There's My Sponge Candy!

New Home

2007-09-11T14:18:00.001-05:00

Find me now at Vacationland.

Onward, Upward

2007-09-07T11:49:00.000-05:00

Things have gotten better. Considerably better. I haven't had any more days where I've just wanted to stay in bed listening to The Band, armed only with a carton of ice cream and a bucket of vodka. My real life has started. School is in session. I have people to talk to. I have work to do. I have things that tell me this will all start to feel normal very, very shortly.

There are moments when I catch myself thinking that all of this--the move, the new job, the whole idea of getting what I want--seems strange but wonderful. There were times over the past year where I thought this life was impossible, that I was doomed to live in my bedroom in my father's house for the rest of my life. There were times I was terrified that I wouldn't be able to heave myself out of the adjunct world, that my friends would all go on to bigger and better things without me, that I would be left behind as the one who didn't do so well for herself.

But it's okay now. And even though I might have held on to a secret terror that I might be living in my father's house for a few more years, I know now (just as I knew then, but was in too cranky a state most of the time to admit out loud) that the last year was very important for me. Not only did it knock me down a couple of pegs from my grad school high, but it also grounded me, reminded me what was important, put me back in my family circle.

Last year was like a free pass. I had no rent, very few bills, and the ability to run around with my oldest friends, with my family. It was time for me to take stock, to remember what is most important in life. It was like a spa visit: I rested, I rejuvenated, I filled myself with all the best that Buffalo has to offer.

I think I was given last year just so I will never forget where I come from and how important the place and people were (and are) to making me who I am.

My year at home gave me a new kind of steadiness. When I came back to New York in August of '06, nothing about my insides was solid. I was a wobbling mess of emotions. I didn't know where I was going, how I was going to get there, and what I was going to do without all the people I left behind in the Midwest. But I learned. I had time to come down, to take several deep breaths, to realize it's all going to be okay.

I understand now. I understand why that year was important, and I am here to admit once and for all that, even though I complained and whined and moaned, living in my old room for a year wasn't that bad. At times it was even fun. Being in the house in the middle of the country, where the crickets and frogs sang their songs at midnight, was the best little vacation I could've asked for. There isn't any other place that smells as green and lush and beautiful as my home, and I often caught myself standing out on the porch as the sun set and breathing deep, deep, deeper than I ever had before.

But it's time for my new life now, and I'm ready. I'm in the place I've been dreaming about for years. And because I'm in a new place, and because I've got a new home, I've made a new blog so this one can stand on its own, so I can page through it remember the year that set my head on straight, that got me ready for everything that's coming next.

From now on, you can find me here, at Vacationland.

Today Is a Tough Day

2007-08-29T12:15:00.000-05:00

Today is not a good day. Today is a tough day. Today is the type of day where I find it incredibly difficult to remain upright and out of bed. Today is the type of day where all I want to do is draw the curtains, put in a CD by The Band, and drink Absolut Peach from the bottle with a long straw.

Did I have these kinds of days when I moved to Minnesota? It's tough to say. A move is so busy, and down-time that isn't devoted to cleaning or rearranging or unpacking is hard to come by, so my diary from the time after my move to the Midwest is kind of sketchy. Most of it revolves around me thinking one of the older TAs was cute, cute, oh so cute. There are a few days when I wrote a snippet about it being hard, about it being a little tough, and about being worried I might not make friends, but those kinds of entries weren't around for long.

This time I feel sort of wrecked. I feel exhausted and wrung-out, like there's very little left to me that hasn't evaporated into the coastal air. I miss my family, I miss my friends, and I miss my boyfriend, who was good enough to come spend the first week in Maine with me. That might have made it harder, watching him go, watching him get on an airplane, then having to turn around and drive back to the new place alone. For real this time.

Everything here is beautiful. The weather, the flowers, the sky. I recognize that, but all I want is a dark room and my not-yet-hooked-up-to-cable TV showing fuzzy network channels and their midday soap operas.

Moving is an awful, awful thing.

But school starts soon. Tomorrow we start department meetings, so I'll have people to talk to then. I'll have social interaction and sound. I've been missing sound. It's been so quiet here in between phone calls. But there will be sound again soon, and this weekend my father rolls into town with his fiancee and a load of things that didn't fit in my car. There will be lobster then, I hope, and a trip to the coast where I will stand on some craggy rocks and breathe in the salt and wind and remember one of the reasons I wanted this so badly in the first place.

No Moose Yet...

2007-08-26T18:31:00.000-05:00

But I have seen these things:

Ready to See Some Moose

2007-08-19T09:15:00.000-05:00

Well, this is it. I have packed, I have loaded the car, I have bruised myself in every way possible while packing and loading. I guess that means I'm ready to go.

Today will be a whirlwind. I'm going to bake some cupcakes, attend a family reunion, go to a soccer game, say goodbye to the girls and Josh, and then I'm going to take some Tylenol PM and attempt to fall asleep early because the Boy From Work and I have to be on the road by 4:30 AM just so we get into town tomorrow in time to sign my lease and get my key.

The next week will be filled with furniture-shopping and apartment-decorating. There will be updates, of course, and there is a new blog on the horizon. I just think this blog and my year back in Buffalo should stand on its own, should remain in its own place, just like the original Where's My Sponge Candy blog that recorded my three years of graduate school. I'd like this year and all its ups and downs to stay right here, right in its own nook, looping like it was some song about drinking and hockey and love gone wrong written by The Lowest of the Low.

And for now, here I go.

Foul Boy, Bad Liar

2007-08-17T08:56:00.000-05:00

Last night was another going away party for me, this one hosted by my mother. She had pizza and spinach bread and a bucket of fifty wings. She had my aunt and uncle and grandfather and his girlfriend and some cousins and my friends and the BFW and, and, and, of course, my brother.

Adam left the party early. He had an agenda. He had a party. He had to get there fast.

Still, as my party was breaking up, my brother strolled back in the door. We were all standing in a group near the door, so when he walked in we asked him what he was doing home when there he could be drinking, snacking, and making out with vaguely skanky underage girls.

"Well," he said, brushing past us, "I forgot something."

"What did you forget?" I asked. It would have to be something really important to make him leave a party where there was free beer.

My mother's boyfriend mumbled something under his breath. "Condoms," he coughed out. "Condoms!"

That started a chain reaction of exclamations: Eeew! Gross! Foul! Blecch! that only stopped when my brother reappeared in the room.

"So," we asked again, "what DID you forget?"

My brother raised his left hand. In it was clutched the belt clip for his phone. "My cell phone holster," he said. He kind of just stood there. We stared at him. "Well," he said, "I guess I should go."

When the door swung shut, the guys started laughing. "Cell phone holster," they said. "Yeah, sure. Right, kid."

I had to admit--the boy hadn't planned that excuse very well. He hadn't given the lie enough thought, enough time to breathe and seem realistic. To come home from a party with thumping music and hoochies and bottles of cheap tequila just waiting to be guzzled--to come home from that for a cell phone holster seemed not only improbable but really, really stupid. But, of course, forgetting to take condoms to a situation like that was also really, really stupid. Not running to the corner gas station for a three-pack and instead opting to come home where you knew your annoying relatives would be clustered nearby, just ready to grill you about your suspicious arrival home was also really, really stupid. But that's my brother.

We walked people out to their cars then, and that's when we found out my brother hadn't yet left. His car was up a ways, obscured by a pine tree, but we could hear him talking. We thought he was on the phone. We thought maybe he was orchestrating some general sluttiness, a hookup with a girl, the getting-it-on with some little blond whippet.

We ignored Adam and said our goodbyes. Some of the family started packing up the trucks and Becky went off to her car, which was parked up somewhere near Adam's, and we thought that was it for the night.

Oh, but it wasn't. When I got back inside, I realized my phone was ringing. It was Becky.

I answered. "What's up?" I asked.

"Just so you know," she said, "your brother isn't alone in that car. He's got a girl in there."

"Oh my God," I said. "I may vomit."

Of course I got off the phone right then and there and told the rest of my family that not only had he sneaked back home to get his condoms so he would be prepared for whatever the night would bring, but he also brought the girl along with him. If I were that girl, I'd be wondering why he was driving all the way home to get his condoms and why he wasn't just popping into the closest Kwik Fill, why he was dragging me along and telling me please, for the love of God, just stay in the car so I wouldn't run into any of the people who were at the house at that moment. If I were that girl, I probably would've handed him a ten dollar bill and told him to go to the Rite Aid and stop being a big lame cheapo.

The Words "Grandma" and "Twat" Should Never Go Together

2007-08-16T09:59:00.000-05:00

Last night my father had a going-away party for me. There was pot roast and corn, several bottles of wine from my favorite winery. My father's fiancee came over, and so did her extremely hot son and his very skinny, very tan, very perky girlfriend. My grandmother came, and her husband--the farmer she married after my grandfather died--came late because he'd been delivering bales of hay all day.

We ate, we passed out dessert and coffee, we chatted. Then my grandmother announced she wanted a copy of my book about Russia. I went to dig one up in my room, which, because of my scattered way of packing, looks like a tornado or some other weather disaster whipped through it. I found a copy, but when I brought it out, my father was showing off his copy and--to my dismay--a literary magazine that one of my stories recently appeared in. The story in this particular literary magazine is one of the Wily Republican stories. It's the one that features the cardboard cut-out of the George W. Bush that lived in the Wily's room. It's the one that required me to use one of my least favorite words--twat (eew)--in a list two of the characters were making. There's two sex scenes in the story, there's all sorts of swearing, there's all sorts of stuff that a grandmother does not need to read.

Not too long ago I wrote a post in which I appeared all brave and ready for my family members to read my work. My logic was if I could survive my mother's reading of my thesis--including a story which was loosely based on our relationship post-my parents' divorce--then I could survive anything. Back when I wrote that post I was working on a story that was inspired by Christmas parties at my grandmother's house, and I said I wouldn't even mind if she read it. I was ready. Bring it on! I thought. I was sure I could handle it.

I was wrong, wrong, wrong.

I am a pussy.

If I cringed when my father forked over a story that used the word twat and had sex scenes that featured the ever-popular hoist method, I'm pretty sure that means I won't be ready for grandma to read a story that features a grandmother and three close-in-age granddaughters who might resemble my own grandmother and her three close-in-age granddaughters.

I don't know what happened to me in that moment when my father slid the magazine toward my grandmother. I lost it. I froze. My entire insides turned cold. In my head, I saw the word TWAT!!! in giant letters on the page. I couldn't get over the fact that my grandmother was sitting across from me and undergoing a revelation that I am a foul, sicko pervert who cusses like a sailor. Then I remembered the rest of the story: the sex, the expletives, the blatant mocking of a political party that my grandmother and her husband no doubt associate with.

I glared at my father. I tried to send him a Look. I tried to say, Rip that from her hands! I tried to say, Are you crazy? I tried to say, Do you want to be written out of the will because the fruit of your loins writes pornography?

He finally got the hint. "I think," he said, "Jess might be nervous about what you're reading."

Yeah, that helped.

I stood up. "I'm going to go into my room for a second and try not to throw up," I said.

My father followed me into my bedroom. "What?" he said. "Come on. Who are you kidding? Your grandmother loves this."

I wanted to tell him no, my grandmother wouldn't love that. I'd put money on the fact that she'd love me to write little stories that could someday be made into Hallmark Channel movies. I'd bet a lot of my savings that she wouldn't be psyched that her granddaughter was writing lines about it feeling pretty good to be slammed up against a wall during sex. I was pretty sure my father wouldn't like it either, but he hasn't really finished anything I've written. He tries hard, sure, but he is easily distracted and often has to put the book down before he's made it to the real offensive stuff. He's been trying to read the Wily-based story since last August when I came home.

"Dad!" I said. "I use the word twat in that story! TWAT! And there's sex in it!"

"Your grandmother is a woman," he said, as if that made it somehow okay.

"She's seventy-eight!" I said. In my experience, seventy-eight year olds are fans of the Chicken Soup books or Anne Geddes, not the f-bomb and out-of-wedlock lovemaking.

Eventually I went back out to the kitchen, and my grandmother was still there, busily reading my story. She was even laughing. I wasn't exactly sure what she might be laughing at, so I wracked my brain to think if there were non-disgusting funny parts in that story. But I didn't have to think about it long because my grandmother explained what she was laughing at.

"This is funny," she said. She giggled. "She puts her bra on the cardboard cut-out of the president. Ha!"

"Oh," I said, "yeah. The main character certainly does do that, doesn't she?"

Well, really, the main character puts her underthings on the cardboard George W. whenever she is having sex with her boyfriend--she doesn't like the way George's eyes follow her if left uncovered.

And my grandmother read that. It made me want to poke my eyes out with a stick. Of course, she thought it was funny, and funny enough to mention out loud, and funny enough to make her giggle as she was sitting next to her almost-deaf, hay-baling husband who would punctuate the silence every few minutes by talking about corn, manure, or the air conditioning unit in his tractor.

So maybe it wasn't quite the disaster it could have been, and maybe I was being overly sensitive while I worried over my grandmother's reading of that story, but I think I've learned a very important lesson: I'm not exactly ready for some stories to make the family rounds. A nonfiction book about Russia is one thing. I'll gladly autograph it, and I'll gladly discuss reading and sifting through the research so I could write that book, but I don't think I'm quite ready to sit in front of my family members as they leaf through my collection of stories and come across dirty words and dirty scenes. I'll get on a stage and read those things out loud to strangers--hey, that's no problem--but I don't want to sit in a very small kitchen and watch my grandmother's eyes scan the page, drinking it all in. There wasn't enough wine in the room to prepare me for that. Not even close.

Here's What I'll Remember About My Last Day: That Table of Seventeen and the Pea-Hating Lady with the Mustache

2007-08-09T08:13:00.000-05:00

Last night was my last night at the restaurant. The Boy From Work had scheduled me to work my last day with my favorite people: my favorite waitress, my favorite dish people, my favorite ice cream people. The only person missing was my favorite cook, the girl who was good spirited enough to host a going away party for one of the ice cream boys, a party where the departing ice cream boy vomited everywhere and the boys had to tie plastic bags on their feet just to get into the bathroom and try to get him in the shower so he could puke into the current of moving water. Later, my favorite cook would spend hours scouring the ice cream boy's puke out of her carpet and off her toilet. Later, she would be the one to get the ice cream boy in the shower. She would stay up with him all night, and she would take care of him the next morning. If that's not a good hostess, then I don't know what is.

Anyway, last night was my last night. At first it seemed like it was going to be just another Wednesday night at the restaurant, but things took a turn around six o'clock. I already had some decent tips in my pocket, and I was feeling pretty good about my last day. I'd had a group of four sit at the counter and tell me I was a great little server, that the food and service was wonderful. They left me eight dollars on a bill that definitely did not call for an eight dollar tip. I thought, What a way to make an exit. It seemed the best kind of last night to have: a complimentary, well monied night.

But a little after six o'clock several cars pulled into the parking lot. The car doors swung open and out poured people, people, people. They walked the entire length of the restaurant's large front window. There was no end to them. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven...

"Oh my God," my favorite waitress said. "This is yours. I want nothing to do with it."

The people kept coming. Twelve, thirteen, fourteen...

"Gee, they could have called ahead," she said, and then she disappeared into the kitchen, leaving me with the large table.

The fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth person finally filtered into the restaurant, and we arranged the entire back section for them.

I've never been the type of waitress to delight in big tables. The girls at my last waitressing gig salivated and fought over big tables. I always bowed out. I just wasn't a fan. There's so much potential for disaster when waiting on a large group. So many things can go wrong. Drink orders can go awry, food can come out on the wrong plates, the people themselves can be snobby and rude. I prefer to deal with people in small doses. I like a table of two, three, four, five. I feel like I can give better service when I don't have to raise my voice to Teaching Composition octave just to announce that I'm taking only drink orders and that I'll come back for the food orders after the drinks have been filled.

But these people, my goodness, they were dolls.

The table was comprised mostly of kids and teens (and the gayest twelve year old boy I'd ever met), so I'd dreaded my first approach to the table. Kids can be awful, they can be pains, they can make you want to strangle them. But these kids were heaven-sent, polite, super sweet. They said please and thank you. They complimented the food and service. They joked around with me. They turned on the jukebox and danced. They made the other customers smile.

I loved them.

When they left, the table of seventeen left me a big, fat tip. At this point I was definitely thinking, Okay, alright, great. This is my kind of last night.

Then 8:20 rolled around. That's when a family of four sauntered through the door and sat themselves at the first booth. At first they--a father, a mother, two girls--seemed mostly normal. They were the usual clientele: worn-looking rural-types, the man with a gristly beard, the mother with her own budding mustache. The girls were little and cute, but you could tell a few years later, when they were in the big school district next door to the one I attended, they would become girls so similar to many of the girls I worked with: cute girls with horrific grammar, girls whose main passion it was to stir up drama, girls who thought nothing of sleeping with other girls' boyfriends and then laughing about it over a burger and a shake.

But for now those little girls were fine and sweet and nice. They wanted chicken fingers, and they wanted them hot and with extra bleu cheese. Their mother and father wanted the daily special--the chicken and biscuits, which I had been coveting all night. The mother requested that the mashed potatoes that came with the special also be covered with gravy, but that was as much direction as they gave me.

Well, it turned out that they should have given me a whole bunch of directions. For starters, someone should have directed me to the fact that the mother was unstable, weepy, and vaguely crazy.

After I'd delivered their food I gave them a few minutes before popping back in to see how they were doing. When I arrived at their table, the father and the girls were eating like normal humans. The mother, however, was not. She had her face cradled in her hands and she was sniffling. No one was paying her any mind.

I didn't know what to do. "Uhm, how is everything over here?" I asked.

One of the girls waved her fork at her mother. "Could you get that plate out of her way?" she asked. "She doesn't like peas."

The woman was crying because the chicken and biscuits came with vegetables in it--quite standard, actually--and the inclusion of peas had wracked her to the core.

I blinked and blinked but picked up the plate and whisked it away. As I walked away from the table I was bombarded with thoughts. First, was the woman not a grownup? Could she not handle asking me to take her food away like an adult? Did she really need her children--who couldn't be more than twelve years old--to translate her sobs for her?

Second, if someone doesn't like peas so much and would be reduced to tears at their mere presence in a dish at a restaurant, wouldn't you think it wise for that person to perhaps clue the waitress and cooks in on the aversion?

This whole mess reminded me of a memorable Monday night--all you can eat pasta night--I was waitressing at the old joint. A woman placed an order for the spaghetti with meatballs and never said a single word about having an allergy that might flare up depending on what was in the spaghetti or sauce. When I brought out her plate, which was garnished with Parmesan and parsley, she shrank back in her seat. She was appalled. "What is that?" she asked, wagging her finger at the Parmesan.

I told her it was Parmesan cheese, just a garnish.

"I," she said, her voice horrified, "am allergic to Parmesan cheese! You need to get it away from me!"

Yes, lady, right. Because you would never in a million years guess that Parmesan cheese might come with or on or even in the sauce of spaghetti.

The lady with the peas reminded me of that lady. Except as far as I could tell, she wasn't allergic to peas, just terribly disturbed by their presence.

But I went over to that table with a menu in my hand and gave the pea lady a few more minutes to dry her eyes, to dry the moisture that had accumulated in the prickly stubble of her upper lip, and then I took her order for the fried chicken dinner. I went over several more times after that to make sure that this time things were okay, that she was happy, that she was satisfied now that any and all peas had been taken from the proximity.

I wondered what was going to happen when the bill came. I wondered if they were going to be angry that I charged them for her dinner. I didn't feel as though it was right to take off the price of her dinner when we hadn't done anything wrong, when she had just neglected to tell me she had a serious problem with peas. I even wondered if maybe this were some sting operation, the kind of which I'd heard about before--a family going into a restaurant, one of them raising a fuss and claiming the food was bad or wrong, then trying to get worked into such a lather over it that the manager or person in charge was forced to placate them by making the check disappear.

These people were going to be the last people I waited on at the diner, and these were the people I was going to remember for a long time. I prepared for the worst--screaming, fit-pitching, more crying--but nothing happened. In fact, they even left me a good tip. And then they left and we were able to sweep the floors, mop the floors, put up the stools at the counter, roll the next day's silverware, put away the pitchers of iced tea and lemonade, wipe down the ice cream counters, and that was it, it, it. I walked out of that restaurant with a thick wad of money in my pocket and shoulders that felt lighter.

It's been an interesting summer. I went into the whole summer job thing, the whole return to waitressing, with a big swallow of dread caught in the back of my throat. I felt above it, like I shouldn't have to go back now that I'd gone through graduate school, now that I'd spent a few years teaching college level writing. I whined. I even cried. After I got the job at the diner, I drove home thinking oh God oh God oh God oh God. I didn't want to go. I didn't want to do it. I thought no one would like me, that I'd be too old, that they'd think I was no fun, that the whole experience would be awful.

All of that worrying was for nothing. The summer was fun, and I liked almost everyone I worked with, and I'm pretty sure they liked me back. (Some, of course, more than others.) It was a hectic time, and I wrote almost nothing, which completely violated all my summer goals, but now that I've had my last day I feel like my head's on straight again, that I'm not going to be so caught up in the drama of the place, that I'll finally be able to get some things done--things like gutting this room I've been living in for the last year, my old room, my room decorated with the suns and moons I was so crazy over in high school. I'm starting to pack today, starting to sift things into boxes, starting to put things in piles to be packed into cars for my big move that's going to happen in a week's time. I've got an awful lot of work ahead of me...

Crossing That One off My Life's To-Do List

2007-08-07T08:31:00.000-05:00

This weekend I slept in my car. I slept in my car like a bum, a crazy person, an aspiring actress who packs her things and heads to Hollywood to get a job at In and Out Burger while praying that she'll make it big someday, oh, someday.

I didn't sleep in the car alone. I slept in the car with my mother. We were in Maine, in a parking lot of a hotel that attracts truckers, and we were there because of an online reservation that went awry.

We went to look at apartments this weekend. It was going to be an easy enough trip--start out on Friday, get there late, sleep, do a whirlwind apartment-viewing on Saturday and possibly Sunday morning, then drive home and be done with it. My mother made the hotel reservation because she lives in a place that has fast internet, unlike out here in the country where we connect to the internet at a maddening 24k.

When we arrived in our hotel in Maine the man behind the counter looked at us strangely. "I don't have any record of your reservation," he said.

My mother told me to go out to the car and get her receipt, which she'd printed off and brought with her.

And I did. On my way back inside, I unfolded the piece of paper and saw that my mother had accidentally made the reservation for next weekend, not this one.

It was 11:45 PM. We'd just spent the last ten hours driving, and two of those hours were marred by us screaming Pussies! Pussies! PUSSIES! at the people of Massachusetts who turned on their blinkers and would not go above 45 mph during a thunderstorm that was terrific, yes, but did not warrant that kind of emergency driving. That had made us tired. Reading that my mother had botched the reservations made me even more tired. And so I trudged back inside and handed over the piece of paper.

My mother was not pleased with herself, but, like a logical person, she figured everything would be okay. All we needed to do was make a reservation in the here and now, get ourselves a room, and pass out.

The man behind the counter informed us he had no rooms. In fact, no one in town had rooms. He'd called around and everything was booked. And not just for tonight. Tomorrow, too.

"Sorry," he said. He shrugged and went back to shuffling papers so he could avoid a potential scene.

However, my mother and I are not scene makers. We merely went back outside and sat in the car. On my way out, I'd nabbed a few maps, and I started calling 411 for hotel information in cities that were close. Everything was booked, though, and one of the girls I got on the phone told me the unfortunate news: everything-everything was booked.

"I've been on the phone trying to find people rooms all night," she said. "There's nothing out there. All the hotels in the state are full. Actually, everything from Portsmouth, New Hampshire up to Bangor is full. I'm so sorry. There's nothing we can do."

Apparently we had picked a very popular weekend to come to Maine. Apparently half of America had decided to plop itself on the coast for those two days I needed to find an apartment.

"What are we going to do?" my mother asked. She's not one for these types of gray areas. She gets nerved up about traveling, about having things go wrong.

I didn't know what we were going to do. What was there to do? I had a sudden vision of my mother and I sitting at a corner booth in Denny's until 9 AM when we were meeting the real estate girl. We would drink an awful lot of coffee. We would eat an awful lot of pie. We would show up for our appointment looking grizzled and smelling of late-night fried food.

I didn't know what we were going to do about sleep that night, but I did know that we needed something for the next night. I pulled out of the hotel parking lot and drove to another hotel parking lot, one that was likely to have some kind of wireless internet I could filch.

And that's exactly what I did. I stole some WiFi and hooked up to Orbitz, found that there were only two available rooms left in the entire town, and those were at the EconoLodge, which my mother and I scoffed at when making our original reservations. But now it was a different story. I wanted to kiss the owners of the EconoLodge for somehow having a room that I could reserve for the next night so I wouldn't have to spend two nights without a bed.

But after we made that reservation it became very clear that we had nowhere to go, nothing to do, and absolutely no options.

"We're going to have to sleep in the car," my mother said. "We're vagrants!"

And that's exactly what we did, and that's exactly what we were.

I pulled into another hotel parking lot, one that was home to several big rigs that had parked for the night. We drove around several times, trying to find a spot that was nearish the lights (to discourage any and all shanking that might occur by crazed murderers who were roving the Maine streets at night) and simultaneously away from the lights (so we could attempt to sleep like normal people). After we found a spot, my mother and I rearranged the luggage so we could recline our seats all the way back (thank you for that small mercy, Honda Civic). I struggled into my pajama bottoms and wadded up a t-shirt for a pillow. I used a hoodie for a blanket. I stretched out as best I could but found that--because I am so tall--my feet dangled at an awkward position, and I could never get them comfortable. This would be what kept me up most of the night. My mother, however, had brought herself a sleeping pill because she knew that her drinking caffeine to stay awake for the drive would screw with her attempt to fall asleep after the drive was over. She took that sleeping pill and was down for the count within the first hour. It took me much, much longer.

The next morning we were faced with the biggest challenge: somehow making ourselves look presentable to the people who had the power to rent me an apartment, and do this despite having spent the night in the car and despite having not showered.

That was when we went to Denny's. We stuffed clothes and makeup and hair things into a bag and sneaked into the bathroom as quickly as we could. My mother had serious qualms about what the other Denny's customers would think about two ladies who went into the bathroom with a bag full of things and came out with new clothes on a few minutes later. "They're going to think we're homeless," she said.

"We're going to buy breakfast," I told her. "Homeless people can't afford to buy breakfast. No one will think anything of it."

I did, however, feel pretty skeevy and gross and guilty as I washed my face in the Denny's bathroom sink.

No one really noticed us, though, and we did get big breakfasts (with extra bacon for our troubles). And the rest of the time in Maine was pretty decent. I toured several apartments I liked but found one I fell in love with and got quite giddy over as soon as I stepped inside. We're just waiting for the credit and background checks to go through before I am approved and before I can load up some cars and make the big move.

And I feel a little less stressed now, a little less on edge now that things have been put in motion. And I'm starting to compile a list of things I really like about Maine, and that list makes me feel a little less stressed, too. On top of that list is, of course, the proximity to the ocean and the fact that grocery stores in Maine have full-blown liquor aisles and full-blown wine aisles. That's right--grocery stores in Maine sell bottles of Absolut Peach alongside produce, deli meats, and cheese. Thank you, Maine. Thank you.

A Conversation with the Boy From Work While He Sleepwalks, 12:30 AM

2007-08-01T12:25:00.000-05:00

Because the Boy from Work is passed out on the very uncomfortable sectional couch in the living room, I shake him to see if he wants to go to sleep in my bed.

Me: Hey. Hey, do you want to go to bed?

Boy from Work: {Grumbling}

Me: Was that a yes?

BFW: {Grumbling}

Me: Don't you want to sleep somewhere more comfortable?

--At this point the BFW scissors up in a shockingly agile way. He stares at me.--

BFW: (angrily) Just do it like you always do it, okay?

Me: Huh?

BFW: Why can't you just do it like you always do it?

Me: I'm asking if you want to go to bed in my room and not out here in the living room, BFW. What are you talking about?

BFW: The taco shell! The taco shell! Just put it on top, upside-down, like you normally do. Okay? Geez.

Me: Oh my God. Are you sleep walking?!

--And then as fast as he was up, the BFW is down again, and he lands with his face planted in a pillow. I can't convince him to move for another half an hour. When he wakes up, he remembers talking to me about the taco shell, but he has no idea why. I think maybe the stress of owning a restaurant is catching up with him.--

Of All the Strange Birds, This One Is the Strangest (Part Two)

2007-07-31T08:03:00.000-05:00

The Stoned Cowboy brought his family in last week. I was working a split shift where I was covering lunch and dinner. Since I was working the split shift, the other lunch girl had gone home and the other dinner girl hadn't gotten there yet. I was alone.

When the Stoned Cowboy's red van pulled in I groaned, but I immediately shoved my escalating annoyance away when I saw the doors swing open, when I saw a woman step down from the van, when I saw a child tumble out of the back.

"Stoned Cowboy, Stoned Cowboy, Stoned Cowboy!" I hissed into the kitchen. "And he's brought his family!"

The Stoned Cowboy pushed into the restaurant and stopped dead when he saw me standing behind the counter. "You!" he exclaimed. I froze. "I want you as my waitress!" he said.

"Well," I said, "you're lucky. I'm the only one here. Looks like you're stuck with me."

He turned to his wife. "This," he said, gesturing to me, "is Jessica." He nodded at his wife for my benefit. "This is my wife," he said. "Remember how I was telling you she was away? Well, she's back now."

I nodded and smiled brightly, even though the Stoned Cowboy had never told me his wife was away. I reached for some menus.

The Stoned Cowboy, his wife, and his son filed back to the rear of the restaurant and seated themselves at a booth. The Stoned Cowboy waved away the menu when I tried to set it in front of him. "You know what I want," he said.

A reuben. He wanted a reuben. It would be his fourth of the week, and those are just the ones I witnessed during my shifts. Reubens are wonderful sandwiches--one of my favorites, actually, delicious, gooey, tangy things that always hit the spot--but I wasn't exactly sure if it was a good idea for one person to eat that many reubens in a week's time. I could see all the Stoned Cowboy's veins flooding with Thousand Island dressing, his heart being tangled in sauerkraut.

Well, he wasn't the only one who wanted a reuben. His wife did too. "He can't stop talking about them!" she said.

The son didn't want a reuben. He wanted a Buffalo Chicken Wrap, without tomatoes.

I took down the information and went back to the kitchen. The Boy From Work was manning the grill again because the lunch shift cook was busy making pies in the back. I handed him the order. "Enjoy," I said.

When I took out their drinks, the Stoned Cowboy introduced me to his son. "Peter?" he said. "Peter, this is Jessica."

Peter stared at me. He looked about as excited as if it had just been announced he was going to have three teeth ripped from his head without Novocaine. He was a cute kid, really. He didn't look like either of his parents. He wasn't straggly and gangly like his father, nor was he plain but normal-looking like his mother. He had a wide face, but it was striking. He seemed like the type of kid who would grow up to be attractive. He had pretty, clear eyes, good skin, moppy hair. He was emitting an attitude of casual boredom, like he was thinking about being bored but it was just too much work, so he was only going to be half-bored.

"Say hello, Peter," the Stoned Cowboy said.

"Hi," Peter said.

"Hey, listen," the Stoned Cowboy said. "Tell me how you spell your name, okay?"

"Mine?" I asked.

"Yeah," he said. "How do you spell Jessica?"

I spelled it for him. He whipped open his cell phone and started pressing buttons. "There," he said. "J-E-S-S-I-C-A. You're in."

I was in? He would've had to hold me down and torture me with spiders and snakes and other foul slithery/crawly things for me to give up my phone number, so I wasn't exactly sure what he was up to.

"Well," he started, "this is for whenever I need to call here. I'll just call you! I'll call Jessica and order a reuben."

I walked back to the kitchen then. I needed to get away. I needed to be with reasonable people. People who were not at all eighteen different shades of strange.

"I think maybe I'll run away with the Stoned Cowboy," I told the BFW. "He's a big fan of mine. He wants me to wait on him all the time, and he just programmed my name into the phone so every time he needs to call here to get a reuben, he'll just scroll down to my name." I paused, raised my eyebrows. "Who does that? Seriously."

The BFW flipped the reuben and looked not at all concerned about my possible running away with the Stoned Cowboy. He did, however, tell me the man was nuts.

Later, after I had brought their meals to them, and after I had given them enough time to savor and check things out, I went back out to the table and asked how the food was. The Stoned Cowboy gave me a sad look.

"I'm not mad, okay?" he said. "Alright? I'm not mad, but this beef is a little bit tougher than it usually is. The beef is usually so tender. I tell everyone how tender it is. I tell the guys at the bank and the gas station that you have the tenderest beef, the best reubens. But this one is just a little bit tough, okay?"

I apologized the best I could, and he nodded along with my words.

"You should tell them that," he insisted. "Tell the cooks that the beef is just a little bit tougher than it usually is."

I said I would, I certainly would tell them that.

"I'm not mad, though," he said. "And definitely not at you. You can't control it. Just tell the cooks, okay?"

I said I would, I certainly would. Then I went back into the kitchen and poured myself a Pepsi. If this was the beginning of my day, I was going to need a few billion shots of caffeine.

A few days later, I arrived at work only to be cornered by one of the cooks. "You will never guess what happened the other day," she said.

"What?" I asked.

"The phone was ringing and no one was able to grab it, so I did," she said. "The guy on the other end said, 'Is this Jessica?'"

"Oh no," I said. Apparently the Stoned Cowboy thought I was always there, that I was a fixture at the diner, that I had a mattress in the back, that I rolled out in the morning, took a shower, donned my black pants and white shirt, and came out to waitress around the time he was getting a hankering for a reuben.

"I told him it wasn't. He wanted to know if you were there. I said you weren't."

"He ordered a reuben?" I asked.

"Yeah," she said. "He ordered a to-go reuben, and I made it for him immediately. He didn't show up for, like, an hour and a half."

So we stood there wondering what kind of world the Stoned Cowboy lived in, what kind of job he held. We figured it probably wasn't one that was interested in strict timetables, in sharp businessmen, in concrete goals. I could see the Stoned Cowboy living on a commune somewhere with his children--he and his wife have several more, together and from previous marriages--and I could see him tending crops, sitting in the middle of a field with a hoe across his knee, a cigarette in his mouth, old Tom Petty pouring from his headphones. I could see him putting a hand on his stomach, realizing it was time for lunch. I could see his mouth watering for a tender cut of beef between slices of grilled rye. I could see him picking up his phone and calling the diner, hearing a girl answer, and I could see him saying, "Hey, Jessica. It's me. I need a couple reubens for the road. Is the beef tender today?"

The Best News

2007-07-27T07:44:00.000-05:00

Today I got the best news, the official word: I am going to be the newest full-time hire at a small community college in Maine. The next few weeks are going to be a flurry of packing, apartment-hunting, and furniture-buying.

But right now I have to pack my car and get on the road. There's a wedding in West Virginia, and I'm fixin' to park myself by the open bar and celebrate with all sorts of grad school friends.

Of All the Strange Birds, This One Is the Strangest (Part One)

2007-07-23T19:44:00.000-05:00

I've waited on some strange people during my various stints as a waitress, but I have never met anyone like the man who came into the restaurant during my Friday double shift.

The man loitered near the front door. He looked confused, like maybe he was waiting for someone. He took a couple steps toward the pie case, bent, assessed the pie. Then he leaned over and started talking to another of the waitresses. It almost looked like he was trying to be sly about smelling her.

"Do you guys have reubens?" he asked.

"Yes, we sure do," the waitress said.

"Yeah," the guy said, "I know. I had one yesterday when I came in with my wife and kids."

The waitress looked confused. I widened my eyes at her.

"Well, you've had our reubens then," she said. "Did you enjoy?"

He said he did. He said he enjoyed them so much that he came in for another today. Then he sauntered off toward a booth. He walked with a sway, a sway that said I am not entirely sober right now.

"He's all yours," the waitress told me, and she passed me a menu.

The man was dressed in tattered jeans, boots, a worn plaid shirt, and a cowboy hat that was decorated with a crown of fresh flowers. His hair--ringlets tinged with gray--fell down past his shoulders and looked suspiciously like it hadn't been washed in several days.

"You can just put the order for the reuben in," he told me.

"Okay," I said. "And what can I get you to drink?"

"Water," he said. "I'm a water-man." Then he sang a little song about being a water man. Water, water, water-man.

I nodded slowly, in case he was having trouble seeing me--because by this point it was clear that he was stoned out of his mind--and I started walking back to the kitchen.

"Wait!" he said. I turned. "What kind of soup do you have?"

We had creamy kielbasa soup (winner in the Most Creative Way to Get Rid of the Leftover Kielbasa Casserole Special from Yesterday category) and our standard French onion, so I told him so.

"Can I have the menu?" he asked. He plucked it out of my hand and spread it out in front of him. He traced his fingers over the words HOMEMADE SOUP. "Can I keep this for a bit?" he asked. He kept tracing the words. He wouldn't stop.

"Sure," I said. "And can I get you any soup?"

He nodded, but he didn't stop tracing the words.

"Which kind?" I asked. "The kielbasa?"

"Blecch," he said.

"The French onion then?"

"Alright," he said. He proceeded to whip out a cell phone with all the bells and whistles and started typing a text message. He would continue typing through dinner.

And aside from him being a bit off, a bit odd, and aside from him looking and acting like a stoned cowboy who wandered in from the 1960's, I could've let it go. I could've let it slide. I could've let all the slurping of the soup and the texting and the mumbling during the texting and the slurping of the sauerkraut and the wandering around the restaurant like it was his own kitchen and it was the middle of the night and he was seriously jonesing for a late snack--well, I could've let all that go, but he came in the next day. And he proceeded to be even weirder.

The next day when I arrived for my dinner shift, one of the other waitresses announced that the Boy From Work (see also: this, part one of this, and our official gang photo) said I should get to take the table that had just walked in. When I peered around the corner to see who it was, there was the stoned cowboy again, wandering around the restaurant like it wasn't going to creep out the other customers.

I sighed. "Gee, thanks, BFW," I said. BFW was standing behind the grill, as he was cooking until the night cook got there. BFW had the makings of a reuben already geared up and ready to go.

"This makes three days in a row that this cat has been here," I said, and then I walked out to the table.

The stoned cowboy was once again stoned. His arm and leg movements were loose and random. He was bopping his head to something, and when I got closer I could see he had headphones stuck in his ears.

I smiled when I got to his table. He smiled back.

"Hello again," I said. "What can I get for you today?"

He gestured to the headphones, like, Duh, I can't hear you. "Music," he said, by way of explanation. Finally, he tugged them out of his ears. "What?"

I asked him again what he wanted. He said he wanted everything he had yesterday, just the way it was, just exactly, except he wanted fries instead of chips and he didn't want soup. "You guys makes the best reubens," he said.

I marched back into the kitchen and tore the slip of paper from my pad. I leaned over to scribble the BFW a note. It said, Reuben w/ fries. XOXO, Jess. P.S. This guy is cuh-razy. Thanks.

Then I went to deliver his drink. When I'd asked him what he wanted to drink, I braced myself for the water-man song, but I didn't get it. He just sighed and shrugged and said, "Oh, a water, I guess," in a dejected kind of way.

When I set the water down in front of him, the stoned cowboy again had his headphones in. And he wasn't satisfied with me just dropping the drink and retreating.

"Hey," he said as I started to back away. "Here. Come here."

He had pulled the headphones out and was holding one up like a peace offering. He gestured toward my ear.

I didn't know what else to do--after all, how do you politely tell someone you don't want to put something that was in their ear in your ear for fear of waxy particles, etc.--so I bent down and tried to stay as far away from the earpiece as possible.

He jabbed it closer. I could hear a familiar song, something I hadn't heard in years.

"How about that?" he asked.

The song sounded like exactly the right song the stoned cowboy should be walking around listening to. If they were making a movie about his life, that song would've been piped in under the opening shot of him ambling down the street.

"I remember that song," I said. I couldn't exactly place it, but I knew it involved a Beatle somehow.

"Who is it?" the stoned cowboy quizzed.

I shrugged. "I can't remember," I said.

He looked disappointed. "It's the Traveling Wilburys," he said. "They're a super-group. Tom Petty, Bob Dylan, Roy Orbison, and George Harrison were all in it."

"Oh," I said. "Cool. I like that song." I wasn't sure what to do then. He was looking at me so expectantly, like he was waiting for me to say something brilliant, something profound. I had nothing to say, so I just smiled and left.

Later, as I was delivering an order of food to another table, I had to walk past the stoned cowboy. I had my arms filled with chicken fingers and beef on wecks, but that didn't stop the stoned cowboy from trying to get my attention.

"HEY!" he said. He had his headphones in, so he was shouting. The customers looked alarmed. "HEY, my flowers died!" He held up his cowboy hat so I could see that the fresh flowers he had at one point stuck in the brim were now wilted and limp.

I stopped. I was balancing several plates. I was clearly in a hurry to get to another table. Yet this man thought it was completely fine, normal, and acceptable to kick up a conversation about his hat flowers when I had steaming food in my hands.

"I'm sorry," I said.

"I need new ones," he said. "You think so, right? I need new ones?"

I nodded. "Yes, I do. Fresh flowers are very pretty."

"Okay," he said, then nodded. I was dismissed.

The afternoon was filled with more exchanges like that--mostly he wanted to talk about the tenderness of the beef and how he was going around town telling everyone that the diner had really tender beef, and he was even telling complete strangers about the tenderness--and then he was gone. He got back into his red minivan--yes, the stoned cowboy pilots a red minivan--and left the diner to go about his business, his strange, strange business of tooling around town and looking for fresh flowers for the brim of his hat.

He would be back for more in a few days. And he would bring his family...

On the Road

2007-07-21T22:55:00.000-05:00

Tomorrow morning, bright and early, this is where I am headed:

Maine, Maine, Maine. There is a college there, a job interview, a search committee.

And here I go.

You Can Imagine The Eye Rolling That Went on Back in the Kitchen

2007-07-20T08:48:00.000-05:00

Sometimes people who come into restaurants are pretty strange. Sometimes they don't quite think about what they are saying or doing (see also: part 1). Sometimes they drive you crazy. Sometimes they drive you to drink. Sometimes they make you wonder how anyone is passing elementary school these days.

Earlier this week I had a family that made me wonder that. It was the mother who concerned me most.

They sat themselves. I brought menus. I took down drink orders. I filled the drink orders. I asked what they'd like to eat.

"A hamburger with fries," the one boy said.

The mother pointed to the smaller boy. "And he'll have a cheeseburger with onion rings," she said. "I'll have the BLT."

I took down all the information, collected the menus, and returned to the kitchen to hang my order. A few minutes later, after the order had been cooked, I stacked the plates on my arms and delivered it. As I was setting the plates down in front of the three of them, the mother's face grew concerned.

"What's that?" she asked. She pointed to the onion rings on her son's plate. They were sitting in a neat pile next to the cheeseburger.

"Onion rings," I said. I wondered what the deal was. I wondered just who on earth couldn't identify a junk food staple like onion rings when they were placed in front of them.

"We didn't order onion rings," she said.

Even though I can occasionally get something about an order incorrect, I knew this was not one of those times. I'd written down everything they'd said just as they'd said it.

"You said your son wanted a cheeseburger with onion rings," I said.

She blinked at me. She looked confused. She pursed her lips and then her face lit up in the way faces have when something has dawned upon them. "Ohhhh," she said. "No!" She laughed, like I was silly, like I was just a big goofy girl who didn't know anything. "Onion rings! Onion rings! I wanted some rings of onion on his burger."

I stared at her. "You mean you wanted a slice of onion on his burger?" I asked.

"Yeah!" she said brightly. "Some onion rings on his burger!"

Bar Fight: Revisited

2007-07-16T10:21:00.000-05:00

One of the cooks I liked has been fired. It's his own fault, I suppose. He was a bit of a drinker. He was quite a bit of a drinker. I sat with him in a bar one night and watched him drink down at least ten drinks in the span of forty-five minutes. He drank so much he couldn't get up in the morning, couldn't function, couldn't get to work on time.

The last time we were out he bought us shots and told us about what a tough guy he used to be, how he used to get in so much trouble when he drank. He told us about this one time he got into a fight and put a guy through a window.

"The first real bar fight I saw was actually in this town," I told him, "and a guy went through a window in that fight, too. It happened up the road. One of the guys crashed through the carpet store's front window."

The cook looked at me. I looked at him.

"Oh my God," I said. "Was that you?"

"I was the guy who put the other guy through the window," the cook said. He squinted at me, trying to see if he could imagine me being there, if he could somehow remember where I was standing. "You were really there? You really saw that?"

I told him yes, I was absolutely there. I was with Josh and one of his friends, and we were just coming back from a night of visiting as many of the small-town bars as we could. We stopped at that last bar--where the fight happened--on a whim, because Josh had a cousin who lived above the bar and he wanted to stand on the street and yell up to her. We were doing that when the action started.

I told the cook that not only was I there and not only did I watch him fight the loud mouth who was asking for it, I also went home and wrote about it.

"You wrote about it?" he asked.

I did. I went home and wrote a long blog about it. I wrote:

I am secretly thrilled. I've never seen anyone go through a window. It's
interesting to watch. Especially when Riverside, who is trying to salvage his
dignity, rises up from the ground and brushes off glass. Riverside's head, which
is bald, is now stained with small red rivers of blood that are trickling
everywhere. Into his eyes and mouth. Onto his shirt and pants.

"I'm okay," he says.

The cook couldn't believe it. I couldn't believe it. It seemed impossible that he and I had been sharing that air, with its crisp smell of blood and adrenaline, on the same corner in the same town over a year ago, when I wasn't even living in the state. Who knew that much later on I'd be standing in a cramped kitchen with him, listening to him explain that, earlier, he'd peed blood or that he was trying to find a date for a wedding he had to go to and did I know anybody who would want to go if he promised to not drink too much and get rowdy?

I didn't know anybody, and I don't know if I'll ever see the cook again. But I do know I'll miss him and the way that he was the only cook who warmed the dinner rolls for the customers, the way he assembled a seriously delicious almond cheesecake, the way he didn't mind so much pouring shot after shot after shot at the bar.

There have been things this summer that feel strange and a little like fate--like the universe is having a good laugh at how things fall into place and how we all relate to each other, how we are all running in circles that are smaller than we think, circles that are bound to intersect and overlap and get all tangled up together. This was one of them. One of many.

Decreased Whining Ahead

2007-07-13T12:44:00.000-05:00

Yesterday the phone rang and, quite unexpectedly, the person on the other line was a woman--a writing program director--who wanted to give me a job. We were discussing the job, the teaching, the possibilities, when the director suddenly asked if I was married.

"You sound married," she said.

I wondered what part of my voice sounded married. What was it that somehow identified me as a girl who'd snagged herself a man? Was there a certain satisfaction in my voice, some kind of confident timbre, something settled and pointed?

"I'm not married," I said. "Not even close."

"Well," she said, "you sure sound like it."

I could have told her that maybe what she was hearing in my voice was along those lines, just not as drastic. I could have told her that for the first time in years I have a boyfriend, and that it was just recently settled that that's what we are--boyfriend and girlfriend--and I am still sort of surprised by it. It feels unnatural. It feels foreign. But maybe that's what she heard in my voice--some sort of half-surprised Hey, a boy likes me.

All of a sudden there's a quiet kindness in my life. It makes me feel foolish for wasting all those years and all that energy running after the Wily Republican, begging him to love me, love me, love me. It's a bit disconcerting to feel how simple a relationship with a boy can really be. I'd forgotten it's not supposed to be a fight every single day, that you're not supposed to wake up bristling and ready to take whatever small cruel thing--intended or not--that a boy sends your way.

It's also disconcerting to suddenly not be the single girl, that one friend who's always hopelessly bumbling through single life, who's always complaining that she doesn't have a man, that she can't find a man, that she'll never find a man, that she'll probably die sad and alone, save for the pack of cats she's named after famous literary figures.

I've been that girl for so long that not being her is going to take a little getting used to. I'll have to find new things to whine about. I'll have to find new ways to fill my time, now that I won't be busy being bitter or angry or frustrated at boys from my past.

I won't be the only one adjusting, of course. My friends--mainly Katy--will have to find new reasons to mock me. Now they won't be able to do 10 minute routines on the woeful state of my love life, on my choices in men, on how I am attracted to the suckiest guys of all time. Instead, they'll have to adjust their comedy routines to include the stupid things I did in grad school, any of the awful poetry I've tried to write over my lifetime, and how freakish I looked during middle school.

It's going to take some getting used to, especially for me, especially because I am very used to being single, to being the one who has adapted to stumbling alone through long stretches of life. But this newness--everything about it--is nice, and I'll take it. I'll definitely take it.

Strange Inspiration

2007-07-09T10:16:00.000-05:00

Stories are strange, the way they come about. I've been inspired to write stories based on people I love, on diseases I've heard about, on scars, on titles that came first.

Just recently I had to put aside a story I've been fighting with for months--I've rewritten the opening pages at least five times--because something new came up. Something better. And this something better came from a strange, strange place.

A part of it came from a piece of graffiti I see every time I drive home from Buffalo. It's the word seven and a picture of a heart. Seven love. I don't know why I love the sound of that phrase so much, but I do.

But it's more than the phrase that gets me. There's something else going on at that certain stretch of highway. A little ways down the road from the exit sign that has been spray painted with seven love is a plastic flamingo--you know, the lawn decoration type. Well, it used to be a flamingo, singular, but now there is a growing flamingo family. The first one sat up there--high on the banking, nestled next to a tree--for months. It made me wonder if the person responsible for seven love was responsible for the flamingo, too, and all the other flamingos that came next. About a month after the first arrived, another lawn decoration surfaced on the hill. And then another. I'm sure it's only a matter of time until a fourth surfaces, expands the family.

But just who does that? Just who takes the time and makes the effort to sneak up the hill on the side of a highway to plant plastic flamingos there? What kind of motivation prompts that action? Thinking about these questions got me thinking about other questions: was anyone going to ever get rid of the graffiti, of the flamingo family? Whose job was that? Who was responsible for driving up and down the roads of western New York, taking stock of the things that weren't supposed to be there? I figured it was someone in the Department of Transportation, probably the same type of guy who was responsible for getting rid of the dead animals that get kicked to the side of the road.

I had all of that in my head for a few weeks, and then one night I was watching Dirty Jobs, because there's nothing I like more than Mike Rowe getting suckered into artificially inseminating horses or catching river snakes or rounding up ostriches or collecting owl poop. And on this particular night, there was Mike, standing on the side of the road with a big shovel, ready to heft a mangled deer into the back of a DOT pickup truck. After Mike and the DOT guy filled the truck with as many dead things they could find, they took those carcasses to a big mulch yard, where they buried them under tall hills of sawdust. They would break down under the sawdust. They would become mulch. They would become part of some unsuspecting gardener's daily routine.

And that was enough for me. It felt like divine intervention that I'd seen that particular segment, that I now knew a little bit more about that job and about the type of person who held it, and I wanted to write it. I wanted to write about a guy whose job it was to make things a little more beautiful, who had to clean up the things that reminded people things weren't always beautiful--graffiti, dead animals--and I wanted to have him taunted, tortured by whoever was being so insistent about leaving strange messages on the local exit signs. I wanted him to obsess over it while he was picking up dead deer, dead possums, dead raccoons, dead foxes. I wanted him to try to figure it out, try to imagine who would do such a thing. Really, I wanted him to do what I was doing every day I drove past those things. And I wanted him to figure it out, to get some answers. Because I know I never will.

Best Conversation of the Day

2007-07-08T18:55:00.000-05:00

Katy: Matt's standing on a chair in the kitchen and reaching for some wine. He's completely naked.

Me: Sounds like the two of you have a good night ahead of you.

Katy: (pausing, giggling) I'm on the phone with you, and I'm touching my husband's wiener.

Reasons to Love Buffalo

2007-07-07T10:48:00.000-05:00

Shortly after I moved back to New York, I was on the phone having a conversation with the Wily Republican. I was whining, actually. I was saying I missed Minnesota, everything about it, even those awful soybean processing plants that hung the smell of millions and millions of those starchy pods in the early morning air.

The WR took about as much of the whining as he possibly could before interrupting me. "Hang on a second," he said. "When you were here in Minnesota, you were always talking about how much you missed New York. Weren't you always wanting to move back?"

I told him no way, there were very few times I ever wanted to pack up my things and hightail it out of Minnesota, and even on days that I did feel that way, I could squelch the urge by drinking a bottle of champagne and eating brownie batter straight from the bowl. I loved Minnesota, I told the WR. There were just days when the people in it--in my grad program, for instance--drove me crazy and that's when I wanted out. The WR understood this, of course, since he was often taking me to lunch or dinner or making me margaritas in the mid-afternoon just so I could tell him stories of who was pissing me off and how.

I told the Wily Republican the biggest thing I missed about western New York, besides my friends and family, was the food. Sure, Minneapolis and St. Paul had good food, had lovely restaurants and the like, but the rest of the state was sometimes lacking in cuisine. The good people of Minnesota were fond of tater tots, fried everything, and ketchup. One of my favorite stories from Katy's brief waitressing stint at Buffalo Wild Wings--a chain establishment that pretends to sell authentic wings (don't get me started on how any place that makes you pay for a cup of bleu cheese to go with your wings cannot claim to be authentic)--was how one afternoon she waited on an old couple who ordered a plate of wings to split. When Katy asked them how they'd like them done--you know, what sauce they wanted them tossed in--the couple looked up at her with big, blinking eyes and told her they wanted them plain because they were just going to dunk them in ketchup.

I almost fell out of my chair when I heard that.

In grad school, I craved Buffalo food like nobody's business.

"But I don't understand," people would say. "Isn't it pretty much the same? I mean, we have Buffalo wings here."

First, I told the people there was more to Buffalo cuisine than the wing (beef on weck, sponge candy, Loganberry, and any Polish staple that can be bought at the Broadway Market). Second, I told people that it made me nervous any time I ordered wings in the Midwest. I don't like having to order something as "Buffalo-style." In the Midwest, you can get your wings either mild, medium, hot, or Buffalo. What, oh what, I asked the native Midwesterners, was "Buffalo" in that context?

"You know," they said, sounding vague, sounding as if they themselves weren't exactly sure, "sort of spicy."

I tried to tell them that in Buffalo, you didn't get your wings "Buffalo." You got them mild, medium, hot, or suicidal. Or, if you were at a particularly saucy place, you might get the choice to have your wings done on the grill and dipped in creative sauces like hot garlic or sesame habanero. And you absolutely did not send the bleu cheese back for ranch dressing or--worse--ketchup.

But that won't happen today. And I won't pine for good wings or bleu cheese or any other fine western New York delicacies, because today is the day of all days, the blessed event, the crown jewel of the summer season: Taste of Buffalo.

Today I will buy $30 worth of tickets and proceed to eat my way through the booths that are set up in downtown Buffalo until I have eaten so much I want to throw up. Then I will rest, refresh myself with a wine slushee, and I will soldier on and eat until I want to throw up again.

It's tradition. It's one of my favorite things. It's right up there on the list of What Makes Buffalo Pretty Fantastic, ranking high, along with sunsets over Lake Erie, lots of snow days in the winter, and, of course, the Buffalo Sabres (and, specifically, my future husband).

In a few short hours, I am going to be the fullest, happiest, most satisfied girl in the history of girls. Bring it on.

I Like to Meddle

2007-07-05T09:26:00.000-05:00

On Monday morning my brother showed up unannounced at the house. He's been doing that a lot lately, which doesn't make me all that happy because there have been several times where he's almost caught me pantsless, shirtless, or any sort of half-naked. I can't even imagine what my brother would do if he ever saw me half-naked. Probably some variety of what I'd do if I ever saw him half-naked, and that would involve a blunt object and spooning my eyes out with it.

But on Monday my brother had made the trip out here for two very specific reasons. One involved an old van one of his friend's aunt's had used in her carpet-installation business, a van that she'd given to Adam's friend, a van that Adam and his friends were determined to dismantle and turn into a field car that would be able to transport them and large amounts of their friends back to the cabin.

The other reason involved him coming into the diner to eat so he could check out the waitress I am determined to set him up with.

I'd given her notice, and she came to work with her hair impeccably straight-ironed. She had on good jewelry. She was jittery and excited. She stood in the back and wiggled up and down with anticipation.

When my brother breezed into the diner with his friends in tow, the waitress turned and high-tailed it behind the two-way mirror so she could watch Adam and his friends seat themselves in the very last booth along the wall.

"Oh my God oh my God oh my God," she said. She was whipped into hysterics. "He is so hot, so hot, so hot!"

I made a face and went out with a stack of menus for my brother and his boys. My brother had chosen to sit on the side of the back booth that faced the wall. His entire view during dinner would be of the turquoise and hot pink wall that is decked out with pictures from the '50s.

"Hi boys," I said. I doled out the menus and then hit my brother on his fuzzy head. "Are you a moron?" I asked. "Don't you think you should be on the other side of the table, so she can see you and you can see her? Don't you want to get a look at her?"

His only look at her had occurred a few days earlier, when I'd sent a picture to his cell phone.

"Oh," my brother said, "yeah. I guess. Okay. Switch with me, Tim."

Tim switched. I took drink orders. I went back to the kitchen, where the waitress was leaning against the steel counter and looking like she'd gone into heat.

"Are you okay?" I asked.

"Fine," she said, fanning herself.

I told her I had a plan, and it was brilliant. I'd take the drinks to the boys, get their order, hang it, and then she could help me bring it out. That's when we'd do the official introduction. I'd make her take his food--a beef on weck, just like I'd predicted--and then they could lock eyes and touch fingers and feel the sizzle of something good starting.

She said okay, okay, that was good, that was great, that was wonderful. She said she was really nervous, though. She didn't know if she could do it.

I told her she could, that she was a pro, that it was going to be fine.

Then I went back and told my brother the plan. "I'm making her bring your food out," I said. "Okay? So she's going to hand you yours, and then I'm going to do the introduction. How do you feel about that?"

My brother told me that was good, that was great, that was wonderful. He said he was pretty nervous, though. He thought he might act like an ass.

I told him that it was entirely possible that he might, but he should try to keep it under control.

"Don't tell her I'm nervous, okay?" he asked.

"No, I totally won't," I said. Then I went back into the kitchen and told her he was really nervous.

"That's so cute," she said. "You didn't tell him I was nervous, did you?"

"No way," I said, and it went on like that for another half an hour. I ran small messages between them, and then, finally, the food came up.

"I don't think I can do this!" the waitress said as she balanced Adam's beef on weck in her palm.

"You can," I said. "You can."

And she did. She followed me out, placed his beef in front of him without incident, and then stood there as I introduced her and they said hey, hi, how are you.

After she disappeared to tend to her own tables, I turned back to my brother and raised my eyebrows. "Huh? Huh?" I asked. "She's cute, right?"

He nodded enthusiastically. "She's really cute," he said. "I like her hair. It's amazing. And her smile is possibly the best smile I've ever seen. But don't tell her that."

And that was one thing I didn't immediately go back and tell her--mainly because I figured that's something he can hang onto, something he can use to impress her later on down the line.

So, I think it went well. More than well. Later that night, we all somehow ended up standing in my driveway and letting Adam swing open the doors to the ex-carpet-hauling van that was now outfitted with several folding chairs ("Eventually," my brother said, "we want to have a couch in here."). The cute waitress looked wary, but she climbed up and into the van, she let my brother drive us over the bumpy path that leads to the cabin. She let him show her the warm beer, the outhouse, the inside of the cabin. I was the one who pointed out the cabin's finer points: the stacks of porn (which have doubled since I was last there), the rustic antler decorations, the moldy bearskin rug.

Much later, after we'd been sitting around the fire for a good long time, my cell phone blinked. I had a text message. I opened it and found a message from the waitress, who was sitting two chairs down from me.

The message said, I want to bone your brother.

And when I looked up from my phone and at the waitress, she was staring intently into the fire's flames, trying not to laugh. And I had to get up and pour myself another peach vodka-ginger ale to keep myself from throwing up right then and there.

If Only I Were a Chemical Engineer and Could Make My Own

2007-07-04T10:16:00.000-05:00

In the last four days, I have seen three separate sets of fireworks, and it's still not enough.

Cat, Cupid

2007-06-29T23:06:00.000-05:00

(1.)

Tonight after ordering drinks, a lady at one of my tables looked up at me and smiled. "I have sort of a silly question for you," she said. "Can I ask it?"

"Sure," I said. I thought it would be a silly question about the food, and I was prepared for whatever she was about to throw at me.

"Well," she said, "we're traveling. We've got this cat, and it's in the car. A kitten, really. It's in a carrier and all, but we hate to leave it out there. Do you think we could just bring the cat in the restaurant while we eat?"

I blinked. Then I blinked again. I was thinking, Oh. My. God. And then I had to take a minute out of my life to explain to these people why they couldn't bring their cat into a restaurant. I will never get that minute or those words back.

(2.)

One of the waitresses at work--this would be the one who likes to walk around the kitchen with her white shirt hitched up so the boys can see her boobs, the one who finds any excuse to use the word bone as a verb, to use the phrase ho-bag as a term of endearment--was discussing her man problems. Everyone at this place has man problems (or, if they are a dishwasher or a cook, girl problems), but this waitress's boy problems are impressive in their problematic-ness.

"I'm becoming a lesbian," she announced last week. "Seriously. That's it. I'm through. I'm a full-on lesbian now."

But this week she seems mellowed. She seems almost ready for another boy. So I announced that my brother was single. Then I said something that I never expected to come out of my mouth.

"And he's not bad looking," I said. Admitting that was torture.

"He's pretty nice," I continued. "He's sort of a royal cranky bitch when he's hungry, but if you keep him fed, he's a pretty okay kid. Also, he's building a bar for our cabin. Not bad, huh?"

The waitress wanted to see a picture. I said okay. I texted my brother and told him to send a picture of himself immediately, which he did. The picture he chose to send was a picture where he is making a funny face, a surprised face. It was a goofy picture, but it showed him for who he is. I flipped the phone in the direction of the waitress.

"There," I said.

"OH MY GOD!" the waitress squealed.

"Oh no," I said.

"OH MY GOD!"

"Oh no."

The waitress started jumping up and down. "Oh my God," she said. "I think I just wet my pants! He's hot!"

"Okay, no. Stop. That's gross."

She ran out of the room, and we could hear her squealing in the other room.

"Listen," I said to the cooks and dishwashers, "I know he's not unfortunate looking, but that's a lot of fuss."

"He's cute," one of the cooks said.

"Blecch," I said.

The waitress launched back into the room. "Send him a picture of me!" she said. "Here, I'll send you one."

We sent it. We waited. I walked out to my tables, checked things over, came back behind the line. We looked at my inbox, and there was a message from my brother. Oh, it said, she is real cute.

There was more squealing then, but for some reason I found myself supporting it. I found myself even picking up the phone and calling my brother to see if he wanted to come out to the diner to meet this girl.

"He's nice," I said. "He's a good guy. He's a good friend." Each admission made me want to vomit a little more in my mouth, but I somehow refrained, and I somehow managed to work it so that sometime next week my brother will breeze into the diner for a milkshake and the waitress will appear from the back with her not-usually-done hair actually done (You'll have to tell me exactly which day he's coming in, she said. I'll need to actually do my hair. Unlike today. Here, I'll take it out of the ponytail. It won't move. Ready? Watch. See? Awesome, huh?) and she and her straight hair will woo my brother and bring him chicken wings or a beef on weck and they will live happily ever after.

Or until they get in each other's pants.

Lechery

2007-06-26T10:46:00.000-05:00

At the restaurant, it's not just that one male cook who's foul-mouthed and sex-obsessed. It's also one of the waitresses (who routinely flashes the cooks and finds more reasons to use the word bone than you'd think were possible in a diner). It's also one of the ice cream boys (who likes to discuss porn and all the sex he will get--you know, eventually, after he finds a girl to take his virginity).

But it's also more than just the employees who engage in habitual sexual harassment. It's the customers, too. Well, some of them. Not so much the church-going ladies or the over-taxed mothers who look like they're two seconds from snapping the heads of their children clean off. Mostly, it's the old men. And, last night, for me, it was two old men, two regulars who tromp into the diner at least once a day for coffee, toast, a bowl of soup, or a grilled cheese sandwich.

These men love me. They are my at-work boyfriends. They call me by name, tell me jokes, press filmy dollars into my hands, call me over to their table just to talk. I fill their coffee, smile, laugh when it's appropriate. They say, "Will you be here later when we come back?" They say, "I'm so glad you're here." They say, "You're a such a pretty girl."

Last night they took their chatter to another level, though. The compliments took a turn after I delivered their coffee and cream.

"Have you gentlemen figured out what you want tonight?" I asked. I meant food. They, however, were not thinking about food.

"How about you?" one of them asked.

"Well now," I said, "that's definitely not on the menu."

"It should be," the other one echoed.

I knew I had to get ahold of the situation ASAP, or else this was going to turn into something vaguely gross.

"Let me rephrase," I said. I tapped my pen on my waitress pad. "What would you gentlemen like to eat tonight?"

As soon as the words left my mouth, I realized my mistake. Here I was dealing with two old men--who clearly still have the mind frame they had in high school--and I gave them that to work with.

"Well," the older-looking one said. He gestured toward my apron--slung low over my hips--and waggled his eyebrows. "You know," he said. He winked.

"FOOD," I said. "FOOD. Dinner? A sandwich? Some soup?"

They placed their orders then--and indeed it was a soup and sandwich kind of night--and I ran back to the kitchen to tell everyone what had happened.

"Well," one of the cooks said, "it looks like you're going to be getting a good tip tonight. And you won't even have to flash your customers like the other girls do."

The Two Words That Come to Mind are "Gulp" and "Vomit."

2007-06-23T11:37:00.000-05:00

Last night the worst thing happened. It was bound to happen, I guess, so I shouldn't be so horrified, so surprised, so nauseous. But I am. Oh, am I ever.

Last night my father walked in on me as I was kissing a boy. I've never seen my father move so fast, especially at 3:30 AM, a time when sane 54 year-olds should be in bed, sleeping and dreaming dreams where their daughters are young and not yet kissing boys, or dreams where their daughters are living far away in other states, where the kissing and whatnot goes on in houses other than their own.

The fact that my father walked in on and then ran away from me kissing a boy makes me want to cut out my tongue and scoop out my eyes. I am mortified. If this were a perfect world, he and I would both stay out of each other's way for several days, weeks, months until I felt okay to face him again. But no. Tomorrow I have to attend a graduation party with him.

The boy I was kissing last night was a Boy From Work, and the kissing was just that: plain kissing, straight up kissing, kissing without other things going on. We were, however, under a blanket, which I am certain made the situation look a lot more scandalous than it actually was. All clothes were on and accounted for, except for my sweatshirt, which was pooled at the foot of the couch. I had another shirt on underneath, but I'm sure my father's worked what he saw over and over in his head until he's imagined something very R-rated.

My father isn't one who handles things like this very well. I am, after all, his little girl, and his little girl would never do such a thing with a boy. As he sees it, his little girl bakes cookies and teaches English and likes cats and is a virgin. And because he doesn't handle things like this very well, my father and I have had had our share of uncomfortable incidents. Once, my senior year of high school, after he found out that I'd been sneaking around with a boy he didn't very much care for, a boy I was definitely wasn't supposed to be sneaking around with, my father drove home from work early and sat at the kitchen table until I got home from school. When I walked in the door, my stomach almost fell out of my body. The look he was giving me was pure disaster. He made me sit down with him, made my brother leave the room, then made me answer a string of awful questions.

He said, Did you let this boy touch you, Jessica? and I had to say, Yes, Dad. He said, Did you let him touch you with his hands? and I had to say, Yes, Dad. He said, Did you let him touch you with his mouth? and I had to say, Yes, Dad. I wanted to disintegrate, to spontaneously combust, to melt like the witch in The Wizard of Oz so I would no longer have to be sitting there answering those horrible questions.

I was barely seventeen years old, and what I'd let the boy do with his hands and mouth (no big deal, really--nothing scandalous, nothing advanced) were things that most girls in my grade had been letting boys do since they'd started high school. I was getting a late start, but at that moment, when I had to confess things that were really none of my father's business, I thought there was a good chance I was going to be so scarred by my father's interrogation that I would never let a boy touch me anywhere ever again.

Well, I was scarred by that day, but not scarred enough to stay away from boys forever. A few months later I had met and somehow charmed Keith into liking me. A few months into our relationship, Keith and I were sitting in my bedroom, on my bed, watching TV. My door was half-open, because I knew if I tried to close my door my father would have a royal conniption.

Whatever we were watching went to commercial, so I leaned over to lightly kiss my boyfriend. It wasn't a kiss that involved even the slightest bit of tongue--there were parents around, after all--but I was unlucky in that my father happened to be coming down the hall and--in fine Dad-Fashion--my father overreacted. He told me to meet him in the kitchen right now. He said he had to talk to me about something very important.

When I got out there, my father told me that there was no way his daughter was going to be lazing around on a bed and tongue-ing her boyfriend under his roof. I tried to tell my father that there certainly wasn't any tongue-ing going on, but this only made him angrier. He went on to say that there would be no more half-shut, three quarter-shut, or any kind of shut doors in his house while Keith was there. In fact, there wasn't really a reason for Keith to be in my bedroom anyway, so we might as well go watch TV in the living room, where there were no beds, only couches that were in plain view. My father, who was worked into a real frenzy now, went on to say that he also wasn't a fan of the fact that Keith had come over a few minutes prior to my parents' arrival home that night. He said there was a new rule, and that rule was that Keith could never ever ever ever be in the house if there wasn't at least one parent present. If Keith came over and my parents were running late after work, we had to stay out in the driveway and wait until they got home. He thought all these rules would somehow keep us from being consumed in a fiery swarm of sin.

Of course, my father's discomfort with my relationships with boyfriends didn't completely erase after I grew up, moved out, went to college and grad school. In fact, after my thesis reading last May, the Wily Republican and I were in a corner of the bar, half-hugging and half-dancing, when my father came over and put his hands on my shoulders and took me away from the WR for no good reason. I didn't think anything of it at the time, until I got back over to the table where my friends were gathered for the celebration, and one of them said, What was that all about? And I thought to myself, Yeah. Wait a minute. What WAS that all about?

This winter, when Josh came home from Quebec, he and I went out to our former place of employment on a Saturday night, when it was teeming with the trashiest of the local trash and the skeeviest of the local skeeve, and Josh had an awful lot to drink. There was no way he was driving home, so I drove him back to my house and put him up on my couch with a glass of water and a couple Tylenols. I put on some late night TV and we watched it for a bit before falling asleep. The next morning I woke up at 7:30 AM, and there was my father standing in the archway to the living room, surveying the damage. I was on one couch and Josh was on a separate couch on the opposite side of the room. We couldn't touch each other if we wanted to. But a few days later, while lunching with my cousin, she told me that her mother had come home from a family function and told her that my father had been talking about the horrors of waking up one morning and having a boy in his living room, a boy who had spent the night right there, right next to his daughter, mere feet--oh, those dangerously few feet!--away from her. I was twenty-five years old and on a separate couch from a boy, and yet this was quite the event for my father.

So I think it's easy to understand why this last incident is one that has my skin crawling, that has me wanting to bury my head in the sand, that has me wanting to spend several nights far away from here. There's just something about fathers and daughters--especially this daughter and her father--that takes embarrassment to another level. And if it weren't for this weekend's graduation party, you can bet I'd be long gone, that I'd be somewhere else, some other place that would keep me from running into my father and pretending nothing ever happened, pretending that he didn't demonstrate impressive agility and speed as he ran away from the living room and back to his bedroom, where he probably lay awake for long, long minutes, thinking he liked it so much better when I played in the sandbox and wore pink corduroy pants and called him Daddy.

Two Weeks

2007-06-20T11:57:00.000-05:00

Today marks two weeks since I started waitressing again. In those two weeks, I've remembered one very important thing about working this kind of job: it's way easier to make friends with the boys than it is the girls.

The boys at work are very sweet to me. They leave flowers on my car, they buy me dinner, they bring bottles of my favorite pop to work, they ask for and then read my thesis and book about Russia. They want to discuss my stories and characters. They say, "I don't think the character in this story is as bad as he thinks he is." They ask, "What are you writing now?" And when I tell them I'm writing a story about a brother and sister, a story where the brother has always been so good and perfect and then something happens to change him, to make him an awful man, that's when the boys at work want to know if they can help, if they can illustrate the story for me:

Caption: You stupid bitch!

I tell them we're going to make a very good team.

My Brother's Logic

2007-06-19T13:34:00.001-05:00

At 11:03 AM this morning, I was still sleeping. Last night was another late night--I didn't go to bed until 4:00 AM--and I needed my rest. But at 11:03 I woke up to muffled voices and the sound of someone clomping around outside the house. The outside clomping turned into inside clomping. Then I heard the linen closet, which is right next to my room, creak open.

I got out of my bed and opened my door. I was expecting my brother--who else?--and there he was, his fuzzy head thrust inside the closet.

"What the hell are you doing?" I asked. I'd just spent the whole day with him on Sunday. Seeing him twice in one week seemed improbable. I figured it was possible I was still dreaming.

"Looking for a towel," he said. "Which of these are shitty towels?"

"I don't know," I said. "You better be careful about what you use, though. Dad won't be happy if you use one of his good towels."

"Yeah," he said. He dove further into the closet. Unsatisfied, he turned and headed for the laundry room. He grabbed a bucket and started filling it with hot water.

I was ready to go back to bed, but I realized I still had no idea what my brother was doing at the house. I also had no idea why he was filling a bucket with water like he was about to do some heavy cleaning. So I tried asking again. "Hey," I said. He didn't look up. I raised my voice so it could be heard over the fall of water. "HEY. WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE?" I asked.

He spiked back the flow of the water and looked at me like I was stupid not to know. "Washing my car," he said. "Tim's here, too. We're both going to wash our cars."

I narrowed my eyes at him. "Wait a minute," I said. "You drove half an hour on your day off to wash your car?"

"Yes," he said. "And you brought your friend to wash his car, too?"

"Yes."

"Why?" I asked.

"Because," he said, "there's a hose here. And a bucket. And a lawn. And stuff." The tone of his voice had duh written all over it.

This definitely wasn't the first conversation I wanted to be having on my Tuesday. I blinked at him. "But why wouldn't you just do it at a car wash? You live around the corner from about twelve," I said.

Now it was his turn to narrow his eyes at me. "I don't have the money," he said.

"Not even for the dollar self-wash places?" I asked.

He sighed but didn't answer.

"Let me get this straight," I said. "Just hang on a second, okay? I want to understand. You don't have any money to wash your car, but you decide to drive half an hour each way to Dad's house so you can use his stuff? You got behind the wheel and burned up gas that costs $3.12 a gallon to do this?"

My brother glared at me. "YES," he said.

"Alright," I said, and I turned on my heel and walked back to my room, shut the door, and climbed back into bed. It shouldn't have surprised me, really. This was the boy who, after drinking himself stupid on Saturday night back at the cabin, woke up the next morning and drove all the way back out to my mother's so he could cut the grass before driving all the way back out here to spend the day with our father. Then, once he got here, he spent considerable time sitting at the kitchen table cutting out decals of naked lady silhouettes he wanted to hang inside his new car. Then, when he ran out of those, he decided to drive to buy more. Because nothing says Happy Father's Day! like a naked lady decal run.

No, I shouldn't have been surprised. After all, my brother was the one who, a month ago, after asking if I'd go with him to visit our grandfather in his rehab facility, told me that I was driving and the only way he was going to drive was if I gave him ten bucks for gas for the fifteen minute drive. The child is protective of his gas and money and driving only when it suits him. So I'm not sure why I even spent those few minutes this morning investigating why my brother found it appropriate to waste time and money driving all the way out here so he could park his car on my father's front lawn and use the hose. I should've just shrugged and gone back to bed when he first told me why he came. It's just more of my brother's busted logic. It's just more of him being strange, being silly, being him.

Headline: Girl Marries Seaman

2007-06-17T22:00:00.000-05:00

On Saturday there was much liquor consumed by all at Pearl Street as many of the finest graduates from our high school gathered for Becky and Derek's wedding (and a mini-high school reunion). The bride was stunning. The groom was charming. The DJ played Def Leppard and Bon Jovi. The bartenders were cute and willing to hand out drink umbrellas. I would have taken a bath in the vat of mashed potatoes. In short:

This Is Why I Have Trouble Believing Boys When They Say I'm Cute

2007-06-15T12:26:00.000-05:00

When I was in grad school, I was always telling people that I was hideous-looking as a child. I told them that's why I had trouble believing boys could ever find me attractive. And by the time the whole Wily Republican incident rolled around, I was very confused why he--with his eyes and jaw and voice and general tallness--was wasting time with me when he could be dating any of the lanky Swedish goddesses that roam Minnesota.

I talked about this a lot. I didn't get it, I told people. Why were boys all of a sudden paying attention to me? What was going on?

Finally, after hearing this conversation about eight thousand times, one of my best grad school boys said, "What is your problem? I don't understand why you don't think you're cute."

And that's when I passed him a picture of me at thirteen years old.

He looked at it, looked back up at me, and said, "Oh."

And last night when I was picking through old photos for a project I'm making for Father's Day, I found one of the legendary pictures I'd told people about. I told them it was a horrible picture, a picture that illustrated just how sucky my life was during middle school. The picture was taken at a Hooters after a NASCAR promotion my mother was doing with the restaurant. While she had been doing giveaways, my brother and I had sat in the corner mowing down on a pile of wings. After the race was over and we were ready to go, my parents suggested we do one more thing: have our picture taken with two of the Hooters waitresses. Why they thought this was a good idea is beyond me, but it happened, and here's the proof:

There are several things to note in that picture. First, let's consider my brother. This might very well be where his love for all things Hooters took its root. I mean, look at his face. He's psyched to be standing with his head right at Hooter height. But me? I'm not so psyched. I just look pudgy, sad, and a little bit greasy. I'm wearing a racing-themed jacket, a racing-themed shirt, and acid wash jeans. I am standing next to two toothpicks, two early 90's Hooters girl who have breasts that somehow manage to be larger than even my fat head. I have a giant zit on my chin. I am probably thinking something like, I love Ryan McLean or Why won't Ryan McLean love me? Although I think the answer is evident from that picture.

And while this isn't the photo I showed off in grad school when I was asked to produce evidence that supported my neuroses, I think it would've done a fine job, that it would've elicited the same response that the other picture did. I think sometimes I get confused and think that I'm still that girl in the photo: awkward, bumbling, silly, and years away from finding a boy to love her.

A Phone Conversation with My Father

2007-06-15T10:54:00.000-05:00

Dad: What's this? You sent me an e-mail at 2:30 AM?

Me: It's about that toothpaste recall I was telling you about.

Dad: Oh, I see. Hmm, I also got an e-mail about expanding my penis size. Well, I've got to go. I think I'm going to read that.

Me: Oh my God, I am going to throw up.

Don't Get The Ice

2007-06-12T22:06:00.000-05:00

Tonight at work I watched one of the dishboys climb up on a stepladder to peer into the ice container at the top of the pop machine. I watched him and thought, Huh. That's weird. Why is he doing that? It's our job. He must really be bored.

That's when the dishboy looked at me. He smiled his best smile from underneath his low-slung hat. "Hey, Jess?" he said. "Would you run and get me some ice, please?"

He said it so sweetly that I couldn't say no. Sure I could go get him some ice. But I still wasn't convinced that what he was doing was virtuous, and I told him so. "I swear to God," I said, "if someone is hiding in that ice cooler, I am going to come back here and beat the crap out of you."

Last week when I started, one of the waitresses took me aside and warned me that if ever one of the cooks, dishboys, or ice cream boys asked me to go get them ice when it looked like they were perfectly capable of doing it themselves, then I should go with caution. The ice cooler, which is in one of the back rooms, is pretty big. When lowish on ice, you can fit a human body in there no problem. A few minutes of waiting in ice-cold is worth it to these boys just the second they see the look on the person's face, just as soon as they hear the person scream. "They do it all the time," the waitress told me. "Just watch out."

So I walked back to the ice cooler. I checked the other back rooms to make sure everyone was accounted for. I couldn't find one boy--the ice cream boy--so I headed over to the ice chest with tremendous care. I steeled myself for whatever was going to happen just as soon as I grabbed the handle and opened.

I put my hand on the handle. I thought, Don't be afraid if a teenage boy pops out and screams Boo! I thought, Also, try not to pee your pants if a teenage boy pops out and screams Boo! After all, I come from a long line of women who have trouble controlling their bladder in certain dramatic moments, and while I've never had a problem, I'm figuring it's only a matter of time until someone scares the hell out of me so bad that I have to start wearing Depends.

I eased the handle back and slowly opened the door. That's when a teenage boy pushed off a stack of bagged ice and said Boo!

"Bastards!" I hissed. I ran back to the kitchen. "Oh that's it," I said. "That's it! You're all dead!"

The dishboy shook his head. "No, no, no," he said. "Sssh. Don't say anything. Let's get some more people. Okay? Okay?"

I crossed my arms and glared at him, but I kept my mouth shut. In fact, I kept my mouth shut the entire time as the dishboy took his station again--climbing to the top of that step ladder--and called out to someone else. "Hey," he said. "Do you think you could run and get me some ice, please?"

And then he and I were both quiet, waiting for the eventual yelling and slamming to occur--this time the person being scared had the presence of mind to get back at the ice cream boy by locking him into the freezer for several minutes--and during that silence I tucked silverware into precise napkin triangles and thought, This isn't the worst way to spend an afternoon.

I'm Hoping "Where's My Coleslaw, Bitch?" Will Become a Top 40 Smash

2007-06-10T20:10:00.000-05:00

Last night I dreamed I was playing Scrabble with the cast of Seinfeld, that I was shopping for Chinese dolls, that I was locked in a showroom with vacuum salesmen. Normally I would've woken up thinking What the hell? but this morning it seemed just right, exactly perfect, and not so strange at all.

The last week of my life has been bizarre. I have been asked to give lap dances. I have served heaps of fish frys. I have walked over the Rainbow Bridge into Canada. I have seen a stripper launch her naked body onto a pole and pretend-whisper to one of her stripper friends who is sitting in front of the stage, I am so wasted right now! I have seen a cat break its way out of a cat trap outside a bar at 1:00 AM. I have had flowers left on my car while I was at work.

There have been moments over the last few days where I've felt very much like this is a joke, that someone must be taping this, maybe making a Lifetime movie of my life, or at least scouting material for a campy new musical, something that will be all pink and glitzy, where Bebe Neuwirth plays a small-town girl turned college instructor turned summertime waitress who sings vibrant numbers like "Ain't This a Kick in the Pants?" and "Where's My Coleslaw, Bitch?: A Love Song from Customers" and "There's Something Sexy (About an Apron Full of Singles)."

It's hard to process everything--all the new people and things--and it's hard to get over the comparisons--between the old restaurant and the new; between my grad school life and post-grad school life--but I'm working on it. I'm trying to find my footing in my new routine. I'm trying to find words to write, trying to finish my book, and trying very hard not to panic because a lot of this feels familiar, like I've lived this summer before. It wouldn't be the worst thing, I suppose, to have a deja vu summer, but I just have to talk myself into it. Slowly, slowly, slowly. Slowly and surely, I can talk myself into it.

First Day

2007-06-07T12:07:00.000-05:00

The following things happened to me during my first five hours at this new restaurant:

(1.)

Ten minutes after I arrived and was introduced to the boy who would train me in, watch me wait tables, and examine my general skill level, another new waitress who was just finishing up her lunch shift said, "So, do you have a boyfriend?"

I said no, I definitely did not.

She turned to the boy who was training me in. "And do you have a girlfriend?" she asked.

He said no, he did not.

The new waitress nodded sagely. "You two should date," she announced. "You'd be good together. I can tell just from watching you."

"It's been ten minutes," I said.

"I can tell," she said.

"I'll keep that in mind," I said.

(2.)

During a slow period where I was washing down the front doors that were smeared with grubby hand prints belonging to zealous children who couldn't wait to get inside and have a sundae, one of the cooks--big, sweaty--ambled out from behind the line, leaned on the counter, and whistled at me.

"That," he said, "is a fine ass."

(3.)

When I went back into the kitchen, the cook gave me a big grin. "Sorry about before," he said. "Your butt just looked really nice."

(4.)

An hour later the cook came out of the kitchen again, this time with a twist-tie he'd fashioned into a ring. There was a hunk of broccoli in the spot where a diamond would normally go. "Will you marry me?" he asked.

"Don't worry," one of the waitresses said. "He does this to everyone."

(5.)

Two of the guys asked if I wanted to go have a drink with them after our shifts were over.

"Sure," I said.

(6.)

Somewhere before close, the cook came out and looked at me very seriously. "Do you want to go to a strip club with us? We're going to throw this kid--" here he throws an arm around one of the other boys--"a going-away party before he goes to Iraq. We're taking him to Canada for the strippers."

"Uhm," I said.

"Are you the type of girl who participates at strip clubs?" he asked.

"She's a professor!" one of the other boys said. "What if one of her students saw?"

"So what?" the cook asked. He leaned against the pop machine and waggled his eyebrows. "Hey," he said to me. "If I gave you twenty bucks, would you give me a lap dance?"

~~~

I think, I think, I think I'm going to have a lot to write about this summer.

The Horrors of Waitressing

2007-06-05T13:49:00.000-05:00

Tomorrow I start my new waitressing job. I don't dread the actual work of it, just the social aspect. It's hard to be the new girl. It's hard to break in, to become one of the crowd, the group. It'll take me time to suss everyone out, to understand who is good, who is bad, who is beloved, who is hated.

Being the new girl sucks.

But there's a part of me that's mildly looking forward to getting back into it all. I always loved waitressing--probably because I think good waitressing has a lot to do with good flirting. It's about knowing your stuff and being prompt and courteous, too, but it's also a lot about being a charmer, a witty little thing, a girl who smiles and laughs at all the right times. And because I'm the type of girl who is consumed with making people like her--a girl who gets really upset when people don't like her for whatever reason--waitressing is a really good job for me. It, like teaching, has roots in performance. It's a job where the people doing it are on display, are showing off. Deep down, those people are cold and clammy and thinking, Like me, like me, oh, please, just like me!

But as much as a person can want and try for that, sometimes it just doesn't work. Sometimes there are people who will be hateful, rude, and downright mean. And I'm trying to remember that, trying to get myself back into the proper state of mind before I drive to the new restaurant tomorrow. I'm cataloguing my best and worst times, weighing them, reminding myself that the scales tip more toward the good, and that's what I have to keep in the front of my thoughts at all times.

Still, it's not easy to forget some of the worst memories.

The first (and only) time I was yelled at by a customer came during my second summer at the restaurant. I'd had fine luck up until that point, but I'd seen some other waitresses--seasoned girls who'd been at it longer than I had--reduced to sobbing by cruel customers. The worst was on a busy Friday night, and the incident almost ground the whole place to a halt. The waitress--who was just an eensy thing, pleasant, irritatingly sweet with her customers--had a table of ten. It was a busy night, and fish frys were churning out of the kitchen at a head-spinning rate. Still, people had to wait. The place was packed. There was a two-page waiting list just to get seated. So it was only natural that everything was moving just a bit slower. But one of the men at this table of ten wasn't a fan of waiting. He wasn't a fan of the waitress's brightness when he was so hungry, when he had already waited so long. At first, after they'd gotten seated, he'd been pleasant enough. He listened with mild interest when his wife talked with the waitress about her "real" job--she was a social worker--and he ordered drinks for his entire party.

As far as everyone could tell, things were going fine, things were under control. But then all of a sudden, there was commotion. You could sense it even on the other end of the restaurant, where I was standing. When I got back to the waitress station, which was in a dark alcove in front of the kitchen, the waitress was heaving with sobs. The other waitresses were trying to put their arms around her, but she kept shaking them off.

"No!" she said. "No, no, no!" She shook her head so emphatically that some of her hair fell out of her slicked-back ponytail. She stormed into the kitchen doors, almost plowing into a dishboy. We watched as she kept walking straight past the line, past the cooks and salad preps, and out the back door. When we went out to find her, we saw her sitting on an overturned fruit salad bucket, furiously smoking a cigarette. Her hair was completely down now, and her face was bright red from the crying.

It turned out that the man who'd at first been so friendly was not so friendly at all. In fact, when he got impatient for his food, when he got angry about how much time he'd already had to wait just to get a table, he called the waitress over. He asked her what was taking so long, and when she gave him the honest answer (it was busy, the kitchen was backed up, there was only so much they could do) and asked if she could get him another drink while he was waiting, the man erupted in a spout of hate. He told her she was a horrible waitress, that she didn't know anything, that she was foolish and silly. Then he struck his final blow. "I can't believe you're a social worker," he spat out. "It's so obvious you'd be horrible at that job."

I give the waitress credit, though. She cried for a good five minutes, then dried her face, smoked one last cigarette, and went back in there like nothing ever happened. You could tell how badly she'd been crying, but she delivered their food, refilled their drinks, brought them more bread, and spoke only to the man's wife, who, she could tell, was hugely embarrassed about what happened.

Later that night, after the rest of the party had exited the restaurant for the car, the wife came back to the alcove and touched the waitress's shoulder. She told her everything her husband had said was untrue. She said the waitress was an extraordinary girl. She pressed an awful lot of money into her palm.

My incident with a yeller wasn't nearly as bad as that one, which threw the whole restaurant into a tizzy, the cooks and waitresses and busboys and dishboys and even the owner trying to calm the waitress, trying to figure out exactly what to do with a customer who belittled a girl in front of a full restaurant. But still, my incident was bad enough to etch it forever into my mind, so I will never forget exactly where these people were sitting, what they ate, and what they said to me.

It was a table of two. A husband and a wife. They were treating themselves. They'd come in for steak dinners.

It started on a sour note after I filled their drink orders and came back to see what they wanted to eat.

"I'll have the prime rib," the husband said.

I told him we didn't do prime ribs on Tuesday nights. It was a weekend thing, and I pointed to the note that explained that, which was written in bold print right above the menu's entries for the different prime rib cuts.

The man was not happy. "That's ridiculous," he said. "You should have it every night." He paused, sighed dramatically. "We'll need more time to think about it, then."

I apologized and gave them another few minutes before returning to see what they'd chosen.

The man wanted one of the 12 ounce steaks we featured, so I recorded how he wanted it done (medium-rare), what kind of potato he wanted (baked), and what kind of dressing he wanted on his salad (ranch, and no garbanzo beans or onions were to touch his salad).

When the wife ordered, she said she wanted the 10 ounce steak. There were two different 10 ounce steaks, so I asked if she meant the 10 ounce strip steak. "Yes," she said. I wrote it and her particulars (well-done, baked, Italian dressing) down on my pad and went on my way.

Later, when I delivered their dinners, the husband glared at me. "What," he asked, "is that?" He pointed to the steak on his wife's plate.

"A 10 ounce strip steak," I said. I thought maybe he was going to complain about its size, say that it couldn't possibly be 10 ounces.

"That's not what she ordered," he said.

"Yes, it is," I said. "She wanted a 10 ounce strip steak, well-done."

He looked at me like I was crazy, like I was a fool. "That," he repeated, "is not what she ordered."

The wife had developed a sudden interest in her flatware. She kept rearranging them in front of her.

"But it is," I said. "I even repeated it out loud, asked if it was correct, and she said yes." I looked at the woman, thinking she'd correct her husband because she knew what I was saying was right.

The man's face turned red. "This steak is not the steak my wife ordered!" he said, his voice now booming. Other tables stopped chewing and slanted their eyes in our direction so they could see how this would all shake out.

The wife finally spoke. "Actually, dear, it is what I ordered," she said.

"No, it's not!" he screamed, and her eyes immediately snapped back down to her plate. She held her breath, blinked her eyes rapidly.

I didn't know what to do. How do you handle a situation like that? I knew I was right, the person who ordered the dinner knew I was right, and yet I was being yelled at for it. So I did the only thing left to really do: I pandered.

"I'm sorry, sir," I said. "I just delivered what your wife ordered. If for some reason you are unhappy with it, I can take it back and get the cooks to make her another steak."

That's when he snapped. He told me he didn't come to a restaurant to have such awful service. He said when he dined out he expected to get what he ordered the first time he ordered it. He didn't want to have to wait around for another steak to be made. He wanted to know if I could understand that. "Or are you stupid?" he asked.

As much as I wanted to crack that man across the face for talking to me, not to mention his own wife, like that, I didn't. After all, his wife was staring down at her plate and looking like she was ready to cry. It was clear this wasn't a new thing. It was clear this was a trend, that he spoke for her, decided things for her, and ignored her on a daily basis. At that moment, I didn't want to make things worse for her.

I breathed. "I'm sorry, sir," I said. "I'll bring a new steak--whatever she wants--and get you some free drinks. What would you care for?"

"Oh, she'll eat the one she has," the husband snapped. "But bring her a chardonnay and bring me a whiskey."

I nodded. When I took a step back from the table, I realized the entire restaurant was staring at me. Everyone was wearing the exact same expression. The I'm So Sorry, But I'm Glad I'm Not You Right Now expression. The only person not wearing that expression was the bartender. She was a tough old broad, a woman who looked like she'd been around the block a few times, a woman who looked like she'd seen all the world's bullshit and tolerated absolutely none of it. Her expression was filled with rage. She was bristling, ready to launch from behind the bar and take the man up by his ear and throw him out the front door.

I retreated to the waitress station to punch in the drink order. The bartender came and stood next to me. "That's just bullshit," she said. "Absolute bullshit. Who does he think he is?"

I was concentrating on the computer. I was also trying not to cry. I'm not one to take getting yelled at lightly, and I've been known to turn on the tears for something as simple as a Campbell's soup commercial, so it was work to get those tears--which I could feel backloading behind my eyes--to stay put. I wasn't about to give that man the satisfaction. I wasn't about to let him see me cry.

"Want me to say something?" the bartender asked, which I loved her for. I loved the thought of her marching over to that table and giving the man a piece of her mind. I pictured her saying, You, sir, must have a very small penis. She'd been known to do things like that to mouthy bar customers. She was possibly the most badass woman I knew. She was the type of woman who not only would wear leather chaps, but look completely appropriate in them too.

"No," I said. "I've got it." I knew it was my turn to be badass, too, just in a more subtle way. I was going to go back to that table and pretend that I got treated that way every single day, that I was used to it, that it was no big thing, and he'd have to do something way worse to break me. It was clear, after all, that this man's hobby was breaking women. I could imagine he'd been breaking his wife down for years now, until she knew better than to talk or disagree or voice an opinion.

"Alright," she said, "but he says one more thing like that, and I'm bouncing his ass out on the pavement." She said it loudly, and I'm fairly certain he heard it.

But I gathered the drinks the bartender made, brought them over, and, later, even brought them a free piece of pie to split.

The man didn't say another cross word to me. He didn't look at me and only spoke if absolutely necessary, but he didn't raise his voice again. The wife did most of the communication from that point on, in a chirppy little voice that sounded like it was an effort just to get out.

I felt so sorry for her. I wanted for her to make a scene or something, to get up and leave the restaurant, leave him with those dinners and the bill. I wanted her to take the car and leave him stranded. I wanted her to go home, get the locks changed, and make him beg to be let back in. And then I wanted her to tell him he was never, ever, ever going to be let back in.

I knew that wasn't going to happen. I knew they would go home and it would be more of the same for that woman, for the rest of their lives.

But, luckily, you don't run into those people every day. Mostly it's people who are pleasant enough, polite, normal, nice. Some days you are even blessed with extravagantly nice people, like the group whose baby shower banquet I once worked. I was the only waitress on the party, and it was a lot of clearing and running around for one girl to do, and they knew it. At the end of the day, as I was breaking down their buffet and they were gathering up all the onesies and rattles and picture books the mother-to-be had accumulated, the two who had thrown the party came over and handed me a slim bank envelope filled with money. "You're a doll," they said. Inside the envelope was two hundred dollars.

There was also the lady who came into the restaurant once a week and tipped forty dollars, no matter what she had. It could've been a steak or a toasted cheese sandwich, but the tip was always forty dollars. "I remember," she said once, "what this is all like."

My favorite of the favorites, though, was a table who came in for a long lunch one Saturday afternoon. I'd had them before and loved them. There were two couples, friends who got together once a week to share a meal and gossip. They were crazy about this cheesy seafood pasta thing that got rolled out on the weekends, if ever there was seafood bisque leftover from the night before. The first time I served it to them, they gushed to me as if I'd been the one to make it. "Brilliant!" they said. "You're a brilliant girl!" They fussed over me as if I was just the best thing ever.

The next time I had them, they proclaimed I was their favorite waitress in the entire world, the nicest girl they'd ever had bring them food. As their meal came to a close that time, one of the men, who, earlier, had been grilling me about my course of study in college and my ultimate dream job (which I told him was to be a successful author), pushed his empty plate aside and flipped over his placemat. He drew a pen out of his shirt pocket and handed it to me. "I'd like your autograph," he said. "We all know you're going to be very famous someday."

I thought that was lovely. I took his pen and scrawled my name across the back of the place mat. "There," I said. "Maybe that will make you a little money in twenty years." I laughed, but he seemed very serious about it all. He folded the autograph into a precise square and slipped it into his pocket.

"We'll never forget you," he said.

Of course they threw that place mat away as soon as they got home, and of course they have since forgotten me, but it is nice to know there are people out there who are willing to behave that way--so sweetly, so kindly. It's nice to know there are people out there who can very well make your day in the moment you least expect it to be made.

Evidence of Our Cuteness

2007-06-03T13:55:00.000-05:00

After his stroke, my grandfather had an extended stay at a rehab facility whose temperature was consistently set to BOILING. He wasn't its biggest fan, especially considering he couldn't sleep for the heat, hated the hours of rehab (pinning clothespins to a clothesline, setting a table, matching cut-out shapes to their corresponding openings in a box), or his roommate, who had, what my grandfather assumed from the smell, gangrene.

When Adam and I went to visit him shortly before he was sprung from the facility, we found him in the common room, dozing in front of a television that was blaring soaps. "This is no way to live," he told us. "No way at all."

Right after my grandfather entered rehab, I was put in charge of looking after his cat. Each time I opened the door to walk into the house, that cat jingled down the hallway, but as soon as she saw it was me she skidded to a stop and--I swear--looked disappointed. My grandfather might have a cruel streak, and many of my memories of him interacting with my grandmother might include him screaming at her, but he sure is good and nice and sweet to that cat.

He got the cat after my grandmother died almost four years ago. He needed something to fill the space, the quiet. And he became obsessed with the cat. He let it have the run of the house. Simultaneously, he let the house go to shit. It is entirely possible my grandfather hasn't cleaned since my grandmother's death, and I figured that out the first day I went over to take care of the cat.

I hadn't been to the house in a long time. I'd avoided like the plague, actually. Being in there made me sad and quiet and a little sick to my stomach. After my grandmother's funeral, my grandfather took to talking to the urn of my grandmother's ashes. I sure you miss you, old girl, he would say, nodding in the direction of the curio cabinet where grandma was now stored.

I hated when he did that. I hated it so much. I wanted to tell him it must be nice to get all sappy and sentimental now, now that grandma was dead and no longer around to clean the bathroom and make him sandwiches. I wanted to tell him he should have been nicer to her when she was alive, that he should have spent less time telling her she was being ridiculous and stupid. And then, when he built an enclosed mudroom at the front of the house--something my grandmother had wanted for years, something my grandfather grumbled about and put off--and told everyone he did it for grandma, that was the last straw. I wanted to hit the old man. I wanted to ask him what good it did now. I wanted to ask him why he couldn't given her one little thing she'd wanted for years when she was actually around to use it.

It made me sick to think about it. It made me sick to be there. So I generally avoided visiting the house until I had to, which happened when I needed to take care of the cat. When I walked in that first day, I waded through years' worth of filth: a scattering of old pill bottles thrown casually on the floor, paperwork that had been read and abandoned in the middle of the carpet, piles of age-old cat puke, stacks of magazines my grandfather had clearly gotten scammed into buying: Latino!, Cat Fancy, US Weekly, Star, OK!, Wired, Blender.

It was clear that there was going to have to be some intensive intervention before he was able to come home and live on his own again. There was going to be a day where we all went over and cleaned out the house and garage. Thankfully, my uncle's wife did most of the house cleaning--she turned a miracle, actually--and my uncle and mother plodded through the garage, which was still full of a lot of my grandmother's things. After her death, my mother had gone over and sorted through closets and the attic, but she has yet to make a serious dent in grandma's things. It's overwhelming what a pack-rat that woman was, really. During the cleaning session, we found giant boxes stuffed with old pantyhose, damaged Tupperware, and headless figurines. Not to mention moldy books, recipes, and pictures.

Those pictures, though, were really something else. My grandmother kept large envelopes for each of her children and grandchildren, and she sorted each season's pictures into the envelopes accordingly. My grandfather had shoved those pictures onto a low shelf, one that was attacked and flooded for years. But we were able to pull out some really precious photos--hundreds and hundreds that are worth saving, that make me excited because I'm about to make the world's cutest collage of pictures that will hang in my room. Here are some that are likely to be featured:

Here is my mother. Tell me she is not the fattest, cutest baby girl you have ever seen in your life. Grandma should've entered her in contests because she would've won, no problem. Not convinced?

How about now? I'm not sure whose back that is--it doesn't look like my grandfather; it could be one of my grandmother's brothers--but it's possibly the best photo in the history of photos.

My grandmother loved to cut my mother's bangs really, really short, so in any picture you see of her before she was a teenager, my mother is showing an awful lot of forehead.

Here's where I admit something strange. My brother was a much cuter baby than I was. For one thing, he was chubbier, and chubby babies equal cute babies. Second, he looked sort of angelic. Which didn't last long.

Doesn't he look serious and earnest? Doesn't he look like a future pilot, and not someone who will fail out of college so badly in his first semester that he won't even be afforded a second chance on academic probation?

I blame this photograph of me on my grandfather. Who else would've made me pose with a bottle of Jack? It should also be noted that this was during what I refer to as my Vaguely Chinese Period. Between birth and the age of four, I went through a phase where there's something a bit different about my face and eyes, where I look very much like I don't belong to my mother and father.

I was groomed from an early age to be a domestic goddess. Thank you, Fisher Price.

Here I am being photographed with my favorite toy, a pink and white Fisher Price bunny (are we sensing a trend? Can you tell my father worked for FP for twenty years?). I called him Merlin, and he never left my side.

My mother was sort of a badass maker of Halloween costumes. I won an award at the town Halloween party this year because I was the best Indian princess they had ever seen. And how cute is my brother? My goodness, this collage is going to be brilliant.

Thanks for Nothing, Terminal Degree. (Just Kidding. I Still Love You, Baby.)

2007-05-31T16:41:00.000-05:00

Yesterday I told Diana that finding a summer job was going surprisingly slow, and the hunt was surprisingly difficult. I told her I thought this was God's little way of telling me I'd been riding my high horse when I started the job search and that I needed to be bucked right the hell off of it.

When I first started this summer job search, I said both to myself and out loud that it would be a piece of cake, that it would be no big shake, that I would be able to find waitressing work with no problem. Even if it came to it, I could probably go back to my old place of employment because they loved me there, they adored me, and they'd take me back in a hot second.

It turned out nothing was that easy.

In a fit of desperation a week or so ago, I turned into the driveway of a local sit-down pizza place because their sign had broadcast SERVERS NEEDED for the last month. It wasn't really the type of place I had in mind. It wasn't really the type of place I wanted to work for. But still I walked inside, asked to speak to someone about the needed servers, and was referred to the manager.

The manager made me wait five minutes just to speak with him. He took me into the closed-off section of the dining room, which is decorated with wood paneling and filmy watercolors circa 1972, and he started asking me questions. He wanted to know where I'd gone to school, what I'd studied, what kinds of jobs I'd held, what kind of waitressing experience I'd had.

When I listed the places I'd waitressed before, he nodded but seemed unimpressed. Then he sighed and shook his head.

"I don't know," he said. He sucked air in through his teeth, the universal signal for This is gonna be a close call. "See, I'd have no problem hiring you if you'd come to me maybe three months earlier. But you're not really worth it now."

I raised my eyebrows.

"Well," he said, "you see, it would take at least three or four months to get you trained in, and you only want to work for three months before you go back to your other job. I just don't see how that's worth it."

Three or four months? I looked at the man and thought, Surely you must be joking. This wasn't a four star restaurant. It was a quasi-Italian joint that served up plates of spaghetti to senior citizens and families with three screaming children who would've been thrown out of any other restaurant. When I was hired on at my last waitressing gig, we were all under the assumption that it was going to be a three month stint, and no one was worried about getting me trained in before those three months were up--and this was a restaurant that did banquets, had a full bar, and served things like Surf & Turf, not chicken bombers and french fry baskets. I wanted to tell this manager to give me an apron, show me the pop machine, introduce me to the cooks, and let me be on my way.

But instead I just smiled. "I understand," I said.

"You have pretty okay qualifications, though," he told me as some sort of peace offering. "How about I take down your name? I'll give you a call if I think we can work something out."

So I said sure and signed my name to a legal pad that was thick with the names of at least fifteen other women who must've come by and had similar experiences with this man. Just looking at those names--names like Ethel and Betty, and even names like Ashley and Lacey--I knew he'd turned away his fair share of the two best subsets of waitresses out there: the grizzled old-time waitresses who remember fondly the days when they could take their smoke breaks inside the restaurant and the cutesy just-graduating-from-high-school numbers who wear their hair in peppy blond updos and decorate their name tags with hearts and daisies. What else, I wondered, could this man be looking for?

But he was already herding me out the door. "It was a real pleasure to meet you," he said, and shook my hand. "No, I mean that. A real pleasure."

But today I had a little more success. Today I went on a job interview and actually landed a job. The head waitress who hired me didn't seem concerned that she wouldn't have enough time to train me in or that I wouldn't be able to grasp the nuances of the business in three full months. She just seemed to care that I knew I couldn't wear open-toed shoes or have my hair in my face. I told her sure, I was used to it, I knew the routine. I'd done this for five years of my life, after all. I said I was ready to give it another go--a lie, but a necessary one.

As I was gathering my things--which, now, included employment paperwork to be filled out and returned next week when I come for my first shift--she took one last look at my application. "I was looking at this the other day when the owner was in the room," she told me, "and I said to him, 'I think this has to be wrong. This girl is way too qualified to work here.'"

She laughed, so I laughed, even though I wanted to run back into the kitchen and jab myself with one of the biggest knives I could find.

"But, seriously," the head waitress continued, "I'm assuming this is just a summer thing, right? You'll be wanting to go back to school in the fall?"

I think she thought when I listed the university at which I work she must have confused that and thought I was going on to get a PhD because it was already listed quite plainly in front of her that I had both my BA and MFA. "Well," I said, "I'm not a student."

"You're not?" she asked.

"No. Actually, I teach at the university."

That's when she fanned herself with my application, like she'd been hit with a tidal wave of oppressive heat. "Oh," she said. "Oh. Well. You're definitely too qualified for this job. But I'm looking forward to working with you."

And my heart broke a little bit right then and there, standing in that cramped and disorganized office. I was feeling awful and nauseous and like I needed to have myself a good cry on the way home, but I was also feeling repulsed for feeling that way. What a brat, I thought as I drove the winding roads home, thinking about all the times over the summer I would drive that route, stinking of fish and grease. What a snobby, snobby brat.

But this is what it is, and it's unlikely that it will change, so I'll take my lumps. After all, a girl as snobby as me probably deserves them.

The Things We Believe

2007-05-30T12:06:00.000-05:00

The other day the Wily Republican and I got to talking about harems. Really, we were discussing the perks of being royalty, and he seemed to think that having a harem was an excellent fringe benefit.

I told the WR that when I was little I'd wanted to belong to a harem. Back then, I had these opulent, full-color cartoon books that retold all the best old tales, and one of the books was about Scheherazade. In that book there was page after page after page of willowy, tanned women draped in pink and purple and green veils, in tiny garlands of gold coins. I could imagine the way they sounded when they walked into a room, swishing, clinking. I wanted to be that kind of girl. I wanted to command attention when I breezed through archways. I wanted to lounge around on satin pillows and eat fruit and be amused by trained monkeys. It sounded like an okay life, but I didn't quite realize the implications of the harem. I didn't quite realize these ladies had a function other than being pretty and being audiences for monkeys.

The WR found this to be amusing. I'm sure the thought of me at seven years old, running around and draping hankies into my jeans so that I too could swish when I walked into a room, was pretty amusing. So he laughed.

"Yeah," I said. "It is funny what we'll talk ourselves into believing as children." Which reminded me of something else, something worse, something more moronic that I'd believed when I was young. But instead of being founded from something I'd read, this other belief sprung from something I'd watched.

I was eight years old when John Travolta and Kirstie Alley starred in Look Who's Talking. I was little. I was impressionable. I was stupid.

In the beginning of the movie, Kirstie Alley is locked in a passionate embrace with her boyfriend. They are about to have some sex on top of his big mahogany desk, but at eight years old, I didn't understand that was where this was going. I just saw the kissing, and that was something I did understand. When two people loved each other, they showed that love by kissing. Fine. But what happened next I did not understand. Not at all. The editing of the film shows the two kissing and then cuts directly to a shot of sperm racing toward an egg.

Oh my God, my eight year old brain thought. That's how a woman gets pregnant! By French kissing a boy!

Needless to say, that made me very nervous. People were always kissing on television, in movies, even out in the real world. I wasn't sure they knew what they were getting themselves into. After all, that sperm was pouring from the boys' mouths into the girls' mouths, and that meant that, in a matter of weeks, those girls could be sporting beach-ball size lumps under their tank tops. It seemed too dangerous to risk. So I made myself a promise right then and there. I would never, ever, ever, ever French kiss a boy unless I was certain I wanted to have babies with him.

I'm not exactly sure when I came around to thinking that this particular train of thought was inaccurate, but I do remember it took a long time. My mother tried to talk me out of it once, after I'd told her I had no interest in kissing a boy because I didn't want to make any babies. She tried to tell me that kissing didn't automatically mean baby, but I informed her that she didn't have to protect me. I told her I'd seen Look Who's Talking, and I knew what was up. My mother, I'm sure, had to walk out of the room then to go have a good laugh at my expense.

I would assume it took years of listening to snippets of conversation from the high school girls on the bus, listening to the boys in the lunchroom, and listening to things my friends had learned from older siblings for me to finally shake the belief that if I locked lips with a boy I might become a young mother, the kind that was always making tearful appearances on Oprah and Sally Jesse Raphael. And thank God for my coming out of that phase. Thank God. If I'd somehow continued on in my sheltered way, I would've missed so much goodness, and it took me long enough to get to that sweet point in my life as it was.

The View from Our Place

2007-05-29T15:54:00.000-05:00

We went the classy way. Instead of writing something like Blow me! on the cake, we decided to just identify the reason for its being. Here are the fruits of my frosting piping:

And the view. Oh, the view. Does it get any better than penis cake and Niagara Falls?

If He Ever Says the Phrase "Pee Pee Head" to Me Again, I'm Going to Cut off My Ears

2007-05-25T20:25:00.000-05:00

This is the first thing out of my father's mouth when he walks through the door tonight: "What are you going to do with those? They're too big."

He's talking about the cake I'm making for Becky's bachelorette party tomorrow night. In less than twenty-four hours there's going to be a group of girls in Ontario, Canada who are going to a bunch of strip clubs and drinking a bunch of duty free alcohol and eating a bunch of penis cake. Penis cake that I lovingly made. Penis cake that, unlike the one that showed up at my twenty-fourth birthday, doesn't have the herps.

When my father leans over to examine the raw materials of the to-be cake--two eight inch rounds and a 13x9 sheet cake--he looks concerned. "You'll need to make those smaller," he says.

I already know this. But it's disconcerting to hear my father comment on the testicle size of a bachelorette penis cake. Mainly because I don't ever want to discuss penises--fake or otherwise--with my father. It's enough that I've had to listen to twenty minute discussions between he and my brother about the agony of getting the down-there business caught in a zipper.

But even though it's wrong and dirty and gross, I call my father into the room when it's time to shave down the outer edge of the rounds. "Help," I say. "Want to cut them for me?" I am nervous about taking too much, about chipping away at this cake's dignity.

My father hands me a cereal bowl. "Should be about right," he says, and it is. The fact that he knew this so easily is also disturbing.

The next time my father saunters into the kitchen--Deadliest Catch is on commercial--he looks at my progress and nods. I have the shaft cut out, the balls whittled down. There is, however, one important thing missing.

"Are you going to give your cake a pee pee head?" my father asks.

I am holding a knife when he says this. It's a miracle I don't chop my ears off right then and there. While I've never thought about it before, it's completely clear at this moment that the phrase pee pee head is a phrase a father should never say to a daughter.

"Dad!" I wail. "Gross!" But then I motion to the leftover cake scraps. "And you don't have to worry," I tell him. "I'm on it."

Twenty minutes later, after carving and positioning and frosting, I have the final product on the giant platter my father sawed for me. (Here's your penis platter, he'd said after bringing it in and setting it in the kitchen.) I call my father in, gesture to the finished product.

"That," he says, "is a magnificent dick cake."

Oh, and it is. It's a straight shooter, smooth, ample in both length and girth. It's a blank canvas just waiting for filthy sayings to be piped onto its shaft with decorating icing. That, however, will have to wait until we get to the hotel room and it doesn't need to be moved anymore. It's going to be glorious.

Now He Thinks I'm a Lesbian, Too: Incidents with My Brother

2007-05-23T23:28:00.000-05:00

1. At My Cousin's Graduation Party

Adam: I just can't get used to Jess's hair.
Me: He hates it.
Everyone Else: What? Why?
Adam: I don't like the bangs, and it makes her look gay.

2. At My Cousin's Graduation Party, Take Two

Me: Here, try on Kait's stethoscope.
Cousin Jeff: I got her that, you know. It's really nice. The last stethoscope she'll ever need. Well, unless she becomes a veterinarian.
Adam: Cool.
Me: Pose like a doctor, Adam.
Adam:

2. In My Car, 3:45 PM

Adam {out of nowhere}: You know what word is really funny?
Me: What?
Adam: Seminary.
Me: Really? Why?
Adam: It sounds dirty. Seminary. Seminary. Seminary. Semen-ary.
Me: Gross. Don't be foul.
Adam: Rectory's pretty good, too.

3. In My Car, 4:15 PM

Adam {out of nowhere}: You know what other word is really funny?
Me: What?
Adam: Masturbation. {He laughs--two quick and huffy ha! ha!s--then goes back to text messaging the girl he's going to a bonfire with later tonight}

What There Is to See

2007-05-22T12:36:00.000-05:00

It was late that night, probably past two A.M. I was driving home from my boyfriend--Keith's--house, and I was driving the back way. I'd decided no, I didn't want to take the winding expressway home. Instead, I wanted to duck through the hills and valleys of what is, in winter, the capital of western New York ski country.

I had a soft spot for the back roads. After all, Keith was always driving me home that way. The road cuts through hills and pitches up and over their crests. There is one hill that is particularly troublesome--if you don't get a good run going up it, you swear you'll start sliding backward, swear your car will do an extravagant backflip like a clown car at a circus, like some Warner Brothers cartoon.

But that night on the way home I had a fine start up the hill. I made it up and over without a problem, and when I glanced behind me I could see the lights of the fading towns spinning and spinning into the darkness. I had to turn my eyes forward then because once I made it over the hill, I had to stop at a small looping crossroad.

And I did. I looked to my left to see if there was any traffic coming, but what I saw was not traffic. What I saw there, standing next to the stop sign was a pale young boy--eleven, maybe twelve--and he was looking at me. He was feet from me. He didn't move. He didn't seem startled. He didn't seem to want to hide from view, like he was trying to avoid being caught doing something troublesome out there at the stop sign in the middle of nowhere. I wanted to scream. But instead I slammed my foot on the gas and dove over the next hill to get away from that hill, that stop sign, that boy.

Mainly because I'm not entirely sure he was alive.

There was absolutely no reason for a boy that young to be standing next to a stop sign as casually as if he were waiting for a bus or a friend or a ride to school. Not at two A.M., not ever. The only reason to be out at that stop sign at two in the morning was to make mischief. But what was there to vandalize? Stretching out in front of him was nothing but night and fields. The only thing there was that stop sign, and what can you do to a stop sign when you're a twelve year old kid who can't even reach the words STOP? If you can't reach, then you can't attack the sign with a hammer, nor can you spray paint things like being a bitch, Mom! beneath the STOP.

I didn't look back. I couldn't look back. I didn't want my suspicions confirmed either way. I didn't want to see the kid still standing there, leaning up against that stop sign, and I didn't want to see the pale white moon of his face suddenly vanished into thin air. I just drove as fast as I could away from there.

For weeks, for months, I avoided those backroads at night just so I wouldn't have to confirm the reality of that moment. What did it mean if I drove that way again, and again there stood a boy in the moon-white light of two A.M.? Did it mean there was a serious sleepwalker in this tiny town? Did it mean there had been some accident years ago, right there on that corner, and every night the boy stood at the sign thinking about what could have been different, what should have been different?

I didn't want to know. I still don't want to know. But today I drove those hills again, looking for restaurants that might want to hire me as a waitress. Today I passed that stop sign twice--on the way to and on the way from that town, one of my favorites--and each time I stopped at that corner I looked to the left and studied the area very carefully. I was looking for tiny mementos: a wreath of dried flowers, a tangle of weathered ribbons, a teddy bear lanced to the telephone pole that stood nearby. I was looking for things a mother or a father or a sister would leave in memory of someone who was lost, a little boy, a son, a brother. I was looking for things that said, I miss you, I love you, come home.

I didn't find anything, though. But I couldn't stop thinking about that night and what it might be like if I got a job at a restaurant over that hill. What kinds of things would I see late at night as I drove home through the countryside with my apron pooled on the seat next to me, with the car windows rolled all the way down? Would I see that little boy again? Would he still be there, looking out across the hills and the winking lights wondering how he would ever get to where he needed to go, or would I be the only one stopped at that sign and wondering the same exact thing?

These Legs, They Are Itching to Run

2007-05-21T12:26:00.000-05:00

Last night when I went to bed my legs ached. They were heavy. They felt water-logged, thick, impossible to lift. They felt like they used to feel after I pulled a long Friday night waitressing shift, a shift where I delivered no less than seventy billion fish frys. They felt like they used to after I'd had to dash between kitchen and dining room after having conversations like this one:

Customer: You didn't bring me any tartar sauce.
Me: Yes, I did.
Customer: No, you didn't.
Me: The container is right there on your plate. You've already used some.
Customer: Oh, that? That's butter.
Me: No, that's tartar sauce.
Customer: Oh. Well, I need some more. I put that in my potatoes.

Yes, last night my legs felt like they used to feel after I'd come home from work having dealt with customers who couldn't tell the difference between butter--yellow in color, served in foiled pats--and tartar sauce--white with large green hunks of relish, served in a tub that sits on top of the fried fish, right next to a lemon wedge.

When I got into bed last night my legs felt like they'd run all day, like they wanted to keep running, like they wanted to pick me right up out of bed and send me down the hall, out into the night, down the cooling pavement, through the back roads of this small town until I came to something else, something different, something new.

There's a panic in me right now. This is partly because the semester is over and the summer is stretching out in front of me, blank and dangerous. This is partly because I had a really busy, really nice week last week. New Boy cruised into town and we showed him all that Buffalo has to offer (which, really, was The Anchor Bar and Niagara Falls), then Josh left for his summer job in Wisconsin. Before he left, we had a long day full of things like shooting a BB gun out his bedroom window and drinking shots of Southern Comfort at 2:30 in the afternoon. Now, though, it's quiet. And it will remain quiet until it's time for all the sinning we're going to do at Becky's Bachelorette party this weekend.

The quietness makes me feel guilty. It gives me time to think about things, things like I still haven't landed a full-time teaching gig, things like I probably could've done more to land a full-time teaching gig (I sent out another fifty applications? I should've sent out more! Seventy-five! One hundred!), things like I need to find a summer job, things like I think I'm a bad granddaughter, things like I want to get out of this town. There are crazy thoughts in my head right now. I want to get up and go. I want to pack my car and drive until I find some new college, some beautiful, ivy-covered college in New England, and convince the English department that it needs me, it needs me bad, and they just won't be able to live without me so they should just hire me now.

I think, though, I probably just need to breathe and wait. Breathe, breathe, breathe, and wait.

Notes on My Sometimes Unreasonable Love for Blake Lewis

2007-05-17T09:30:00.000-05:00

Last night on American Idol when Ryan Seacrest threw to a commercial, he said, "And after the break, Melinda goes home."

"Notice how he said that," I informed my father, who was sacked out on the couch opposite me. Ryan Seacrest was supposed to be indicating that after the break we'd see film from Melinda's trip back to her hometown, where she would be greeted by legions of fans, where she would sign t-shirts, where she would get her name emblazoned on a road sign at her former school. But there was something sneaky in Seacrest's eyes. I narrowed my own at the television. I could tell something was up.

"Yeah, yeah, yeah," my father said. "I noticed that, too. But they would never do that. Never. They wouldn't dare."

"We'll see," I said. I could feel revolution in the air. It was just that type of night. Things in the universe were moving in strange circles.

I felt a little strange myself. I was torn in my thinking about who should go home. Melinda or Blake? Blake or Melinda?

It was a choice I took very seriously because I am a devoted American Idol fan, a girl who counts the days from one season's end to the next season's start, a girl who parks herself in front of the television every Tuesday and Wednesday night so she can say catty things about the people she dislikes (think: Sangina) and loving things about the people she worships (think: Chris Daughtry).

This year all my love has been Blake Lewis, Blake Lewis, Blake Lewis. I announced it during Hollywood week. He sang something particularly brilliant, something that made me stuff a hunk of chocolate into my mouth, and after it was done I sat back up and said, "That's my boy. I'm backing him. I'm voting him through to the end."

There was just something about Blake. I couldn't quite put my finger on it back then--mainly because I hadn't had enough exposure yet, hadn't had enough weeks to obsess over his performances, both good and bad--but I know what it is now.

I'm crazy about his stubble, crazy about the tone of his voice, crazy about his pronunciation, crazy about the way he holds his head when he sings.

When he sings, Blake tips his head back like he's trying to force his voice out from the pit of his stomach. It makes me want to kiss his throat. It makes me want to bite his stomach. It makes me want to curl up in his tonsils and listen to the wind of his voice rush up and over me.

When he sings, Blake doesn't necessarily finish his words. This is something our chorale director would've beat us for back in high school, but on Blake the quality is endearing. When he gets to the end of the word he sort of just lets it hang there, lets the sound fade off or melt into the next. It drives me crazy yet makes me want to gnaw on his jaw like it's a delicious pulled pork sandwich.

When he's not singing, Blake seems like a real stand-up guy. First, he loves his father. He calls him Daddy. And while I'm sure that's a quality that irritates every manly-man in America, I happen to think it's adorable. I'm completely willing to let this man be my father-in-law:

Also, it appears as though Blake gets along with everyone. For example, he and Chris Richardson were BFF as soon as they both landed on the show. Some hateful people might say this is just evidence that he is gayer than the day is long (and if that's true, fine. Instead of moving in with me so we can have sweet musically-inclined babies, Blake can move in and read He's Just Not That Into You out loud as I massage his shoulders and murmur That's so true, isn't it, Blake?--this scenario is equally as appealing) but I really like boys who aren't afraid to love their friends in an open way. For example, when Ex-Keith was drinking beer, he often liked to comment on his boundless affection for his best friend Greg by saying, Man, I love that tubby bitch. It was touching. I think Blake and Chris's relationship was touching in a similar way. And in a way that had me picking up the phone to call Amy and say, "You know, I think I'd pay a lot of money to see the two of them make out."

My love for Blake was cemented on Bon Jovi night when he did the beat-box version of "You Give Love a Bad Name." After that performance was over, my father shrugged and turned to me. "Well?" he asked. "What did you think of that?"

I tried to play it off all cool. "Oh," I said. "Well. Uhm. It was sort of weird, so I don't think the judges will like it." But what I really wanted to say was, WHY WON'T HE TAKE OFF HIS CLOTHES ALREADY?!

Of course, I can want Blake to take his clothes off for two reasons. The first is that he has done something well--sung brilliantly, did a cute little dance move, or beat-boxed with Sir Mix-a-Lot, for example--and the second is because the clothes the stylist has put him in are stupid. That tuxedo shirt on one of the results shows? Please. I thought we--as a nation, as a united front--were over the tuxedo t-shirt. Sometimes I have the distinct feeling that the show's stylist hates Blake. He often comes out onto stage in clothes that make him look a little thick, a little chunky. I also think they put eyeliner on him last week. And whose idea was it to dye his hair? If I were in charge of the show, I would tell that stylist to stop ruining Blake and keep concentrating on making Melinda look so much better than she did when she first came on the show, looking a little like a she-troll that had lived under a bridge for twenty years of her life.

But now, of course, Melinda is gone. And here's where I will say something shocking: I think that was a mistake. I think this week was Blake's week to go. Absolutely Melinda is a better singer. Absolutely she did a better job on Tuesday night. And if those are the merits we're supposed to be judging on, then Blake should've done his goodbye and gone back to Washington. Still, here's the thing: I think it's time for AI to launch a male pop sensation. The closest we've come is Clay Aiken, who we haven't heard from in a long, long time.

And I also think AI would ruin Melinda. I think they would make her do a record she wouldn't really want to do. The two people the show could do good by is Blake and Jordin. And Jordin, who is the better singer, should win. And probably will, unless Blake pulls out something miraculous and beautiful next Tuesday, which, if it happens, I will totally support. Almost as much as I support him making out with me or him making out with Jordin.

So I was happy last night when Seacrest and the producers pulled their trickiness and it was in fact Melinda who went home just as they'd hinted earlier in the show. I was happy that I called it and happy that Blake got to go over and stand next to Jordin and get transported into the final two, the final show, the Big Daddy of All Nights of TV. I'm excited to see what happens and how it all shakes out. And I'm interested to see just how many pieces of chocolate I will have to shove in my mouth to keep myself from announcing in front of my father that I want Blake Lewis to come live in my bed and wake me up in the morning by singing or--on weekends and big events--beat-boxing into my ear.

Oh, if only.

On the Bus

2007-05-14T21:44:00.000-05:00

We've been through this before. When I was younger, I was not what you'd call a beauty. In fact, I was not much of anything, save for the recipient of one too many Fantastic Sam's perms.

At twelve, I was logging long hours pining away for boys who played football on the town team, boys who dated cheerleaders, boys who French kissed before the age of sixteen, which is when I finally got down to business. At twelve, I was following Tammy around and watching as she--just by walking by--could cause a group of boys our age to snap their heads around as if they'd just witnessed some sort of minor miracle. And I suppose she was some sort of minor miracle. She was, after all, a twelve year old who didn't look angly, gawky, sweaty, nervous, or confused. Which were all the things I looked like as I trailed behind her, popping open Pepsi after Pepsi because I had a crush on the guy who sold them at the racetrack beverage stand and the only way I could get him to talk to me was to fork over a dollar at a time and then guzzle the pop on the way back to our seats.

In short, at twelve, I was a mess.

However, there was one place I wasn't a mess, a freak, or an ugly girl, and that place was the school bus. I was a different girl on that bus, mainly because it wasn't populated by people who could make fun of me. The high schoolers had a policy of ignoring everyone who wasn't above grade nine, and the elementary kids were too busy discussing what was in their lunchboxes to care about what went on in the middle of the bus, which was the middle schoolers' territory until the very last high schooler got off the bus. That's when we claimed the back as our own and practiced for the days that we'd get those seats by virtue of being the oldest, the wisest, the cleverest of the bus riders.

And while I was flying under the radar of the high schoolers and the elementary schoolers, I was being noticed for the first time by boys. These boys weren't the boys I wished would notice me--none of them were golden-haired Ryan McLean, after all--but they were boys nonetheless. And I wasn't stupid. I knew exactly how much power I had on a daily basis, and that amount hovered close to zilch for many years. But those bus boys got a little doughy in the face when I came around, so I learned to be thankful for the pinch of power I had during the forty minute ride to school and the forty minute ride home from school.

But after awhile--after love notes and declarations of feelings--I let it go to my head. I became a mean girl, an awful girl. I became a tease.

The boy I could tease the most was Justin.

His love for me was established early on, and this love lasted for years. He wrote me notes on the bus, in study hall, in social studies, in English, and at home. Later, when we were older and taking a language, he sat next to me in French and slipped me a note every single day. I would read it, write back, tap it up over his shoulder so it would fall gracefully on his desk without our teacher--an overweight man who was a man fond of smacking his pointer on the desk to scare students when they weren't paying attention--noticed what was going on. We had whole conversations this way.

You look good today, Justin would write. Are you ever going to let me kiss you?

Sure, I'd write back. In the back seat of the bus when Mr. Custard isn't looking.

I never let him kiss me in the back seat. But I did do something in the back seat, and what I did was cruel, cruel, cruel.

One day, teasing, Justin said I should wear my bathing suit to school so he could see what I looked like in it. I'd been bragging to him, telling him I'd gotten a brand new red plaid bikini and that I was going to show it off to all the Canadian boys over summer when I went up to Long Point. Justin said that wasn't fair. He said he wanted to see it. I told him the only way he'd see it was if he happened to show up at the local pool on a day when I was there. I told him that seemed very unlikely.

But I was lying. I was lying because I had a plan forming in my brain. I fully intended on having Justin see me in my new red plaid bikini because no other boy had any interest in seeing it, because no other boy was dreaming of seeing me in it, and because I needed to see what it felt like to be the center of attention, to do something scandalous, to do something that would send a boy's head spinning off its axis.

So I did. One day I substituted my bra for my bathing suit and carefully hid the halter straps under a thick t-shirt so my mother wouldn't see and wonder what on Earth I was up to. Our school didn't yet have a pool, so there was no reason for me to be donning the bikini under my school clothes. But I made it out the door without arousing suspicion, and I made it through the entire day without having a teacher or a friend grill me as to why there was a plaid bow tied under my hairline.

Once on the bus, I told Justin what was happening. I told him what I had in store for him. I said, "Just wait until you see this."

I could tell just by looking at his face that he was dealing with sensory overload. I think he was shocked, pleased, and terrified all at once. I think I was all three of those, too. This was a me that didn't show up at school. This was a confident me, a me that thought I was fun and interesting and impulsive. At school I was awkward and goofy and predictable. But for those eighty minutes each day, I had a chance to prove that wasn't all that there was to me.

I sure proved it the day I wore my red plaid bikini.

After most of the other kids had gotten off the bus, and after the middle schoolers had scuttled to claim the best seats in the back, I crammed myself into a corner and smiled at Justin, who was sitting in the seat across from me.

He wanted me to do it, do it, do it already. "Come on," he pleaded.

I did it. But right before I did, there was a moment--a terrible, sickening moment--that made me sit back and think, Is this really the best thing to be doing? I knew what I was doing to him, and I also knew what I was doing to myself. I was taunting him, and I was trying to grasp some measure of power by exploiting what little I had to offer in the attractiveness department. Justin loved me for things other than beauty. He liked that I was witty and willing to play with the boys. He liked that I had scathing things to say about other people on the bus and people we went to school with. He liked that I could spend the ride home writing stories that starred us as beloved crime-fighting heroes. I was different. Really different. And maybe that was just a little bit refreshing. But with this move, with this little red plaid bikini stunt, I would be trading in some of that. I would be saying, Now worship me for this. And what if that didn't work? What if it did?

Even though I knew there were a lot of better things for me to be doing with Justin right then and there--watching him load a straw with spitballs, for example--I peeled my shirt off and folded it in my lap. Then, triumphant, I leaned back against the window and rode the rest of the way home like that. Justin was happy with the result, and he talked about it for weeks. As for me, I was just starting to learn what a girl could do to mold a boy, to take him up in the palm of her hand, to turn him this way and that, to make him--even for forty minutes, for a bus ride, for a few short years--hers and hers alone.

Long Live the Little Queens

2007-05-11T12:32:00.000-05:00

When I was seventeen years old and a senior in high school, I announced I was going to enter a pageant. The Tulip Festival Queen's Pageant, to be exact. It was a part of the annual spring celebration that takes place in the town where I went to high school. Each year when the red and gold tulips yawn open along Main Street, a long train of carnival attractions roles into town. A midway is set up in the town parking lot, and it is dotted with funnel cake and taffy stands, with super slides and merry-go-rounds, with water pistol and dart games.

The Queen's Pageant is one of the biggest events of the three day extravaganza. It's like a mini-Miss America pageant for senior girls, just without the bathing suits. There's a dance routine, a talent competition, a gown competition, and a question and answer session.

And when I announced I wanted to enter the pageant, my parents and brother and Ex-Keith (then Boyfriend Keith) all looked at me like, Really?

I understood their looks. It wasn't my thing. I knew that. And even to this day I'm not exactly sure why I wanted to do it. I just know that one morning I woke up and said, "Well, I guess I'm going to do this."

I even surprised myself when I went to the informational meeting and came away still interested in going through with it. When I'd first stepped into that room, I figured there was a distinct possibility that I would leave thinking, Ha. Yeah right. But I didn't. Instead, I left thinking, Bring it on.

While it might take years of extensive therapy to suss out the real reasons behind why I did it, I can offer some possibilities. First, I wasn't fat anymore. Second, I had my first real boyfriend. Third, I was feeling better and sassier than I ever had before. Fourth, I was coming off a pretty bad heartache, and I think part of me wanted to strut around a stage, maybe get my picture in the paper. I figured the boy who broke my heart would see me in the paper and think about how good I looked, and then he would be filled with a sucking-gaping-awful-evil blackness because he'd done me wrong and hadn't made me his own.

But before I could grace the pages of the hometown paper, I had to face the competition. A handful of my friends were in the pageant with me, but so were a lot of the girls who'd sat court in the Very Popular zone back in middle school, back when people lived and died by those rankings. These were girls who'd had rumors spread about them in fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth grade--rumors that had them losing their virginities, getting pregnant, and being knocked around by their Very Popular boyfriends. In middle school, these girls were little queens, and I was the court jester.

A lot of that didn't matter anymore, but our histories were still there, still weighing heavily on our shoulders as we took to the stage the first time, as we stood in front of our dance coach, as we got the news that our opening number was going to be the most difficult opening number ever seen at the Queen's Pageant. We were going to be swing dancing. And that's when our histories bore down on us. Or maybe just me. I'd never had a single dance lesson. I'd never been that girl who spun circles in a pink tutu or, later, a leopard print leotard. But a lot of the girls standing next to me had. They'd danced at least some or all of their lives. I was screwed.

Everything else I had down. Dress? Check. It was floofy and my favorite color: purple. Talent? Check. I'd originally planned to read a fiction piece I'd been working on, but the powers that be thought it was too morose in subject matter (it was about the end of the world due to nuclear war) and it was nixed in favor of some poetry about Adam and Eve. Q & A? Check. I was like a little rockstar because I knew a lot of big words, and there's nothing that pageant judges like more than a girl who sounds like she knows what she's talking about.

Here's what I know about the dancing, though. I sucked. I sucked bad. I was always shrieking Sorry! to the dance instructor and the other girls when I messed up. Here's another thing I know about the dancing: I only ever did that routine perfectly twice, and, luckily, those two times were in front of the audience. After we'd done it for the last time ever, I remember feeling an immense amount of relief because I'd never, ever, ever, ever have to do it again. To this day, when our song comes on I still cringe a little inside.

But the pageant wasn't only about talent, pretty dresses, and smart-sounding responses. It was about community service, too. It was about being a mover-and-shaker. It was about being devoted to the western New York area. So, part of our obligation as Tulip Queen Candidates was to rove around the area, attending local Kiwanis meetings and mingling with the important men of small towns. We wore satiny little dresses and sat through plated meals of macaroni and cheese and casserole served up in the back room of local wing joints and restaurants. Part of the Kiwanis members' duty was to judge us. They were supposed to watch our table manners, assess our friendliness, and discern how poised we were.

We didn't go as a group, but we didn't go alone either. The powers that be split us up into pairs. Patty, who was still my best friend at this point, was my partner. We attended two dinners--both of ours were at smokey wing joints whose dining rooms smelled like old wood panneling and cheap beer--and at these dinners, Patty attempted to make me look bad. It was cutthroat, this competition. Patty was determined to come off more poised than I was, which wasn't really a hard task since I was just coming into my poise. But she was always finding ways to cut me down. When a grizzled old man I was seated next to asked what I was doing after graduation, I told him I was going off to college to be a English major. The man asked if that meant I wanted to be a teacher. Patty, sensing a way to capitalize on the conversation, leaned over and smiled at the grizzled man. "No," she said. "She doesn't want to be a teacher. There's not really one profession an English major prepares you for. I'm going into political science, though. I'm going to be a lawyer. I'll have a music minor, too. I sing and play flute."

This was some serious stuff. These dinners with the Kiwanis members, who would go scribble down their perceptions of us after the dessert course, were terrifying. After all, how did you make a good impression? How friendly was just-the-right-friendly? And how did you come off as poised? For me, I figured my poise shone through when I didn't kill my best friend, when I didn't stab her with a salad fork, when I didn't run us off the road and into a tree on the way home, even though I was very interested in impaling her on a tree branch.

But there wasn't much time to obsess about how well or not well those dinners went. The talent part of the competition was a major to-do for most girls. Me, I was easy. In the way of props, I asked for a fake tree and a bench. I sat on the bench under the fake tree and read my poetry. Other girls, though, didn't have it so easy. Some required fireworks--not real fireworks, of course, but things that were advanced for a high school production: music, projectors, sets.

One of the girls did a skit to "Paradise by the Dashboard Light." Another had a trellis and a projector for her interpretive dance to a Shania Twain song. Patty, always a fan of drama, had scripted a special note to be read before she went on. She wanted her performance--she was singing "Unforgettable"--to be dedicated to her just-born nephew, her middle sister's child. This sister--unwed and young--had slept with and been impregnated by a boy who then turned out to be gay, a boy who hightailed it out of state with his lover as soon as humanly possible.

Hers had been the most uncomfortable baby shower I'd ever been to. Patty's family was religious, and none of the situation really sat well with them. People were bone-white and dead-quiet at that party. Amy and I sat in a corner and tried not to say anything inappropriate, which was surprisingly difficult, given the situation. It was hard to accept that Patty's sister was just-graduated and pregnant. At the shower all I could think about was this one night the sister had come home from a date with the boy who would eventually get her pregnant. They'd been out walking, she said. It started raining. The air was thick and heavy with the smell of spring and blooming flowers. They were standing underneath the dripping branches of a lilac bush, and that's when he kissed her. It was the most amazing thing, she'd said. The most amazing feeling ever. At the time she told us that story, I hadn't been kissed. In fact, I was a long way off. But I felt something tug inside me. I knew what she meant. I could imagine the perfectness of that moment. I could imagine how everything smelled and tasted and felt like love.

But at her shower, I wasn't thinking about the loveliness of that anymore. I was thinking, Isn't it funny to go from there to here? But the drama wasn't about to end there for Patty's family. A few months later, both Patty's sisters would be hit by a drunk driver. Her pregnant sister went into labor and delivered that night.

And it was that fragile boy who was the feature of the slideshow that Patty had playing behind her as her voice skimmed over the notes of the old Nat King Cole song. A lot of people thought that was sweet, that was cute, that was precious. But I couldn't help think about the way Patty had looked when she sold me down the river over a plate of macaroni and cheese. I couldn't help but think about the cool smile on her face, the sly brush of her eyelashes against the hollows under her eyes, the way her voice came out as practiced as a weathered CNN anchor's. That was a girl who wanted to win, and she wanted it bad.

And it's not that I thought she was happy about what happened to her sisters and the baby, but I did think she was interested in the edge it could give her. There seemed to be a new confidence in her. It showed in the way she held herself, in the way she treated people. She knew she had a human interest story with bite. She knew she had a story that would look good in the paper, a story that would have audience members reaching for tissues as the photos rolled across the screen and she purred through the song's throaty notes.

But even as much as she thought her story was the golden ticket and her way to the crown, it wasn't. Just like my poetry about Adam and Eve wasn't my way to the crown. We both watched as one of the other girls--a girl who'd donned tap shoes and skittered across the stage the way she'd been doing since she'd been born--accepted the crown and took her victory walk clutching a dozen roses to her dress.

However, my vantage point was a little different than Patty's. I'd somehow managed to snag the third runner-up--a feat that had me crying as soon as the curtains snapped shut and all the girls gathered round to congratulate the court and the newly-crowned queen. I just couldn't help myself. I didn't realize until that moment how much I had riding on the results. I didn't realize how much it would mean to me to find a spot in the court, to actually get my picture in the paper, even if it showed me with puffy, tear-splotched cheeks.

While I stood on the tiered platform with the other runners-up I felt a little bit invincible, a little bit like this moment was trying to tell me there were better things to come, like I was going to find out that the things I wanted might come just a little bit easier now that I felt more capable to seek them out. And while I clutched my own roses to my dress and smiled into the flash of cameras, I thought about the night at the Kiwanis meeting, about Patty leaning over and informing the room that mine was a silly degree, a silly dream, a silly thing to want. While I stood there, I hoped whoever was taking pictures for the local paper was catching my smile the way it felt on my face right then. It was a smile whose angle and strength and earnestness was saying We'll see about that, won't we? We'll just see about that.
~~~

And, to celebrate that this weekend is, in fact, Tulip Festival weekend in the old hometown, here are some pictures of my pageant year:

This the show opener. Each girl ran out on stage, chirped out her name (Hi, I'm Jess!!!!!) and then got in place for the swing dance.

Here we are in the middle of the opening number. The circled girl is me, and, yes, I admit that I am wearing gross khakis and a too-big shirt. I thought it was cute at the time. I now recognize the error of my ways. The arrowed girl is Patty and Patty's This Smile Is Way Too Big to Be Sincere smile.

My jazz hands were working overtime.

Here's a washed-out picture of me doing a tour of the stage during the gown competition.

One of the perks of being a Tulip Queen contestant? Getting to ride around in a sporty borrowed car. The only problem with mine was the convertible top wouldn't go down, so I had to hang out the window to toss candy and wave.

Here I am accepting the flowers after being named to the court. If you look to the right, you can see Patty distracting Mary and Becky. It's possible she's saying something like, "Her? You've got to be kidding me!"

My Brother's Idea of an Excellent Gift

2007-05-09T23:06:00.000-05:00

I called my brother the other day to see what he had up his sleeve for the looming Mother's Day celebration that he and I needed to put together for this coming Sunday. I felt the need to call for several reasons: first, my brother tends to forget important dates--dates, for example, that are anyone's birthday but his own. I figured it was entirely possible that my brother didn't even know that this weekend was the weekend we were supposed to turn my mother's trailer into a big festive how-do-you-do to celebrate the fact that she spent numerous hours in labor with us.

Second, I know how my brother is about giving gifts. One year for Christmas he gave my father a Snickers bar and a pack of spearmint gum. This year for my birthday he gave me a can of off-brand corned beef hash. My brother generally believes that spending under five dollars is appropriate for any gift-giving occasion. After all, the less money he spends on the people who raised and love him, the more money he can spend on pear-flavored vodka at the Peace Bridge Duty Free.

So I called as a reminder. I called to check in. I called to needle him for information. I wanted to know what--if anything--he had in mind for Mom's gift.

"Don't worry about it," he told me, his voice confident and booming. He was at work, and it was clear that he wanted to sound Mature and In Charge. "I've got it covered."

"Oh?" I said. I kept my own voice light and vaguely uninterested because I know that more than anything, my brother hates to think people are checking up on him, to think people are messing with his business. "What do you have in mind?"

"Well," he started, "we've got these things at work..."

Red flag, red flag, red flag. My brother--when he's not texting girls named Chastity! or Emmy! or Krissy!, and when he's not slipping crumpled dollar bills that could very well belong to me into the G-string of some Canadian stripper who whispers Thanks for the money, eh! into his ear--works at a tool store. A tool store.

What, I wondered, could my mother possibly want from a tool store?

"What things do you have at work?" I asked my brother.

"Coasters," he said. "These coaster-things. They're clear. You can slide photos into them."

I thought for a moment about what picture I would ever want slid underneath a coaster so that I could set my condensating drink on top of it. I figured a picture of my brother would be appropriate enough. A picture of when he was little and chubby and bullfrog-cheeked. A picture of him before he grew up to be the type of boy who figured that what my mother would want more than anything for Mother's Day was a set of see-through coasters that could be fitted with photos that would be covered up and sweated on by a summer's worth of vodka-tonics and mojitos.

"Wow, that's great," I said, lying through my teeth. I didn't want to tell him it was a horrible idea--which it was--and that Mom already has enough coasters to get by with. She has formal coasters decorated with ivy and grapes, and she has informal coasters that she and her boyfriend have filched from local bars that serve cheap beer and good fish fries. My mother needs another set of coasters like she needs a hole in her head.

"I know," he said. "Pretty good, huh?"

And today I tried one more time--tried to nudge him in the right direction, to get him thinking about something that would be less likely to make it into my mother's next garage sale. I even spoke his own language. I sent him a text. Maybe you should think about flowers, it said. A single rose to go with the coasters. That would be affordable. And nice.

A few minutes later my phone flashed, and it was with a response from my brother.

Perhaps, it said, which, in my brother's language, means the following all at the same time: Are you crazy, Hell no, and Yeah right.

Sixty-Two Down & Thirteen More To Go

2007-05-08T09:26:00.000-05:00

I've been grading research papers for the last four days. They have to be done and back to my students by tomorrow, so the end is in sight.

But until then, let's meditate on the goodness that is Buffalo hockey:

I love that man.

I Like Hats

2007-05-06T14:01:00.000-05:00

Cinco de Mayo: A Comparison

2006:

Drink + Hat

2007:

Drink + Hat

I sense a trend.

I'll Never See That Money Again

2007-05-01T18:29:00.000-05:00

Today when I was taking a break from organizing the crushing amount of research papers I have to read in the next week, I wandered into the laundry room--which, coincidentally, is also the pantry--and I stared at the shelves of food, daydreaming about what I'd make for dinner.

That's when I heard a jiggle at the front door. I froze. Nobody was supposed to be coming to the house today. But there was definitely someone out there. They were jiggling the handle, they were clattering with something, they were turning the doorknob.

I braced myself for the worst: a wild-eyed gunman intent on breaking into the house and looking for anything of value--maybe the last piece of red velvet cake or that blue ceramic duck or that stuffed monkey my father bought for his girlfriend.

But I didn't get that. I got my brother.

"Jesus, you scared the hell out of me," I said. "I didn't know you were going to be out here today."

"Me neither," he said. "I had to go to the dentist, and now my friends and I are going out to dinner." He smiled at me, to prove the thing about the dentist. Then he brushed past me and barricaded himself in the bathroom.

"Are you okay?" I asked through the door.

"Fine," he said. "I'm just looking at my teeth."

My brother is bizarre about his teeth. Honestly. You will never meet someone more obsessed with teeth and oral hygiene than my brother. It takes him half an hour to get ready for bed at night because he engages in what he lovingly calls The Procedure.

The Procedure is a complicated process my brother goes through after brushing his teeth. There's flossing, of course, but then comes several elaborate mouth-washings. There's a flouride wash that has to stay in his mouth for two minutes, and there's another bacteria-eliminating wash that stays in for another two minutes. After those scrubs, flosses, and washes, my brother leans in very, very close to the mirror so he can scrutinize his teeth. He opens wide, peels his lips back so it looks like he's growling at his relection. He picks with his fingers, he rubs with his tongue. He snares every single particle that was living in his mouth.

It's quite the thing to see, and it's quite the time consuming process. A person could do a lot of things in the time it takes my brother to finish The Procedure--solve complex math problems, skim an entire copy of Ok! magazine for black-barred pictures of Britney Spears's lady parts, or bake a double fudge layer cake. In short, my brother is as bad as a cold-creamed old lady who spends thirty minutes in the bathroom smoothing on different Oil of Olay products that promise to eliminate crow's feet and age spots.

And today my brother spent a few contemplative minutes in the bathroom, examining the job our dentist had done on his teeth. Apparently satisfied, Adam reemerged.

"Hey," he said. He leaned against the doorframe to my room and surveyed the mess of extra credit papers and portfolios that were spread out across my floor. "So," he said, "how much money do you have on you right now?"

What I really wanted to tell my brother was it was none of his business how much money I had. But I didn't say that. I shrugged. "I don't know," I said.

"Can I have some of it?" he asked.

And then I did something very strange. I got up, found my purse, and opened my wallet. I had two fives. I handed them over.

"Thanks," he said, and tucked them into his pocket.

"Just what are you going to be doing with my money?" I asked, because I had an idea, and that idea involved Canadian girls in thongs, Canadian girls whose business it was to rub their private parts up and down an oily pole in the middle of a velvet-lined room.

"I'm going to use it for dinner tonight," he said. "We're going to watch the Sabres game at a bowling alley outside Franklinville. I'd like to order something more than just ice water."

"Okay," I said. I returned to sorting through the papers.

"Booze is expensive," my brother said, absently. He still had one hand in his pocket, and that hand was clutching my money.

"You're going to buy liquor with it?" I asked. I have no problem with my brother buying liquor, but I do have a problem with him doing it with my money. Because I could buy liquor with that money, and that's way better.

"No," he said. "DINNER." He emphasized the word like I was a moron, like I hadn't listened, like I didn't know anything about anything. "All my money is gone because booze is expensive."

My brother was taking my money because he'd spent all of his weekly allowance on booze. He was taking my money because he doesn't have access to his. My mother does. She has had my brother on a tight budget ever since he dropped out of college and frittered away his bank account on spicy wings and cheeseburgers at Hooters.

If I hadn't been so tired and so beaten-down by the myriad of wrong things I was seeing in my students' papers, I would've told him it was rude to waltz into a room and demand money from a relative just because there had been an incident--a bender of sorts--and that all the week's money had been wasted on a cheap bottle of vodka and a couple six packs of whatever beer was on special at Tops. But I said nothing. I just gave him a look. A stern look. A look I hoped said, I'm telling Mom if I don't get that money back.

But deep down in my heart I knew I wasn't getting that money back. He promised he'd give it to me on Friday when he gets paid, but I know that money's already been spent, already been promised away to some sort of thing my brother will do this weekend. It's gone forever, just like he was shortly after he got his hands on it. He was going to Walmart, he said, because he needed some things--things that he would pay for with his debit card because Mom had already okayed the purchase. When I suggested he should try paying for dinner with his debit card, he looked at me like, Are you insane?

"Mom doesn't like me to do fun things with the money that's in the bank," he said. "I can't do anything good with that money."

And so my brother does it with mine.

So Long, Farewell, Auf Wiedersehen, Good Night

2007-04-30T20:56:00.000-05:00

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

2007-04-28T13:53:00.000-05:00

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

2007-04-27T08:37:00.000-05:00

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

2007-04-25T12:04:00.000-05:00

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

2007-04-22T21:30:00.000-05:00

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.

2007-04-21T10:35:00.000-05:00

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

2007-04-19T12:03:00.000-05:00

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.

2007-04-18T22:51:00.000-05:00

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

2007-04-16T18:02:00.000-05:00

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

2007-04-12T21:51:00.000-05:00

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.

2007-04-11T22:16:00.000-05:00

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

2007-04-09T21:38:00.000-05:00

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

2007-04-07T22:26:00.000-05:00

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!

2007-04-07T14:09:00.000-05:00

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:

We had the exact same schedule.
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.
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.
We were taking social studies from grumbly Miss Poweski, who was always threatening to beat the class with wet noodles.
We shared the same arch enemies.
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.
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

2007-04-05T21:19:00.000-05:00

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.

2007-04-04T18:57:00.000-05:00

(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

2007-04-02T21:31:00.000-05:00

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

2007-04-01T13:07:00.000-05:00

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:

Gems from Student Conferences, Day One

2007-03-28T16:58:00.000-05:00

(1)

Student: Why did you mark this? What's wrong with this?

Me: Are you asking me why I marked the eventhough on your paper?

Student: Yes.

Me: Even though is two words.

Student: No, it's not.

Me: Yes, it is.

Student: You're kidding me.

Me: Nope.

[A few beats later] Student: I got As in high school English, you know.

(2)

Me: So what do you want to say about this paper?

Student: Well, for starters, it was juvenile.

Me: You mean the way you wrote it was juvenile?

Student: No. The assignment was.

Ryan Miller Day

2007-03-26T22:42:00.000-05:00

This morning on the way to school my odometer hit 77700. Lucky 7s. Like I'd just won some big jackpot, like my dashboard was going to open up and spill coins into my lap. Then the radio played "Shook Me All Night Long," which is, of course, one of the best songs in the history of songs. I was already in an unparalleled mood, but these things made me feel even better. I felt like maybe karma was watching over me, ebbing, bubbling, getting ready to shower me in a wash of you so deserve this goodness.

I mean, sure I had to go to school and deal with a student who'd plagiarized his paper, and sure I had to listen to a student say, "Wait a second. There was a paper due two weeks ago? Huh?", and sure I had say to my students, "You didn't notice that Margaret Atwood repeated the word egg at least fifty times in a span of three pages? You didn't think that might be important?", and sure I had to watch them blink at me with those big doe-eyes students adopt in moments when they want to come off as sweet and simple and not entirely capable of doing a close reading of the text.

None of this bothered me. None of this bothered me because today was Stalk Ryan Miller Day. And I don't mean stalk in the creepy/scary way--you know, when people get all crazy and yell I want to have your babies, Ryan! or wait outside so they can write down his license plate number or follow him home to play mix tapes of songs they think he'll really love. No. My version of stalking involved spending too much time picking out an outfit and earrings on the off chance he might look at me or in my general direction after I'd staked my claim in the bar where he was taping an interview for a local show that helps us get to know our Sabres in a more intimate way.

I got there an hour and a half early, stood in line, was eventually joined by my girls, and we got in, we got a seat, a really decent seat. I was at his back, but anyone who wanted to eat and watch the show had to be at his back. Of course, I was glad I'd done most of my eating prior to his arrival in the restaurant because when people started screaming and when Amy, who moments before said, "I don't think I'm going to get that excited... it's not like he's Justin Timberlake...", let out a squeal that could shatter glass, my stomach flopped over on itself and forgot all about food. There he was--so tall! so skinny! skinnier than I'd imagined!--and I was thinking look at me look at me look at me because I thought maybe if he glanced at me I could give him a real soulful look, a look that told him everything he needed to know about me: that I'm not insane, that I'm not a groupie (well, at least not the type that shows up for this taping wearing a corset, the shortest skirt ever, and spike heels that could easily be used as devices of death and doom), that I'm smart and introspective and not all that unfortunate looking and sometimes funny in a hopeless oh she tries sort of way.

Ryan Miller never looked at me. Of course, how could he? I was sitting behind him, thinking about his hair and his skinny body and the jacket he was wearing. I was sitting behind him and being jealous of all the little kids who got to line up for a Q&A session. I was sitting behind him and listening to Amy say that if she had her way, she'd march right up there, waggle her eyebrows, and ask him How do you like it, Ryan? Huh? How do you like it? (Later, after we'd watched The Black Donnellys and I'd lathered myself into the usual semi-hysterical I love Jonathan Tucker state of mind, Amy went back to the glories of Ryan Miller. I bet it would be good, she said, sagely. I bet he has great legs. And thighs. Big thighs. Think of the thighs. Oh, and I did.)

Really, it was a great way to start the week. I got to sit with my girlfriends and shriek and giggle (especially when a little girl asked Ryan Miller what type of shampoo he used) and eat a pan of garlic bread and think oh wouldn't it be nice, wouldn't it be nice, oh dear God, wouldn't it be nice?

The Girl I Could've Been

2007-03-25T18:02:00.000-05:00

When I was thirteen years old, I had a plan. I was going to move down south to North Carolina, where I would attend UNC Chapel Hill and major in journalism. I would get a swank apartment near a swank bar where the best Winston Cup racers would go after a long day at the shop. I would graduate and land a posh job at one of the best weekly racing magazines and be their go-to girl for all the "insider" news. I'd be able to crack the hard outer shells of the drivers--even the crankiest, most grizzled of them--and I'd become their best girl. They would love me because I would be the type of girl those types of guys like: in tune with their world, sassy, quirky, smart-mouthed, badass.

I saw myself wearing tall boots and a leather coat. I saw myself driving a red car, something fast, something that would blow my long hair around as I breezed through the North Carolina countryside, on my way to another driver's lakeside home, where a big group of us would sit on the porch and watch the sun set over his yacht. We would barbecue and get drunk and sing Johnny Cash songs until we could see the lights from houses across the lake winking late-night messages to us.

I saw all this because it was what I wanted more than anything. This was, after all, when I was knee-deep in the creating of my most beloved characters, Jessie and Ollie. Originally, I started writing Jessie's saga from the point after she moved to North Carolina from New York. I made her life everything I wanted mine to be. She stood up to her boss, won awards for her journalism, mouthed off (and subsequently charmed) Dale Earnhardt, and drank a lot of tequila. This was before I had the two infamous run-ins with tequila during undergrad, so I didn't yet know that tequila can turn me into a rabid she-monster, someone who ends up hanging her head out her boyfriend's truck and almost vomiting into the Niagara River, or the girl who tries to get lucky with a boy on her friend's dorm room bed while the friend has stepped across the hall to watch a music video. (Tequila and I have since made amends.)

In the story, the character Jessie befriended Brooke Gordon--Jeff Gordon's then-wife--and moved in to watch over him when Brooke went off on some sort of modeling tour. "Watch over" turned into "sleep with," and the story went on through dozens of complicated chapters that chronicled their affair and the eventual dissolution of the Gordon marriage (which, in fact, did dissolve in real life) so that Jeff would be free to be with Jessie. There were obstacles along the way, of course, and one of those obstacles was this guy who popped into my mind--an Oliver Covet. Ollie. He used to work for Jessie's father, for Jessie's race team. When I started writing about Ollie and how attractive and nice and funny he was, I realized a girl like Jessie wouldn't have lived her entire life without kissing such a man, and--poof!--they had history, and I loved the history so much that I stopped writing about Jessie's post-New York life and wrote a prequel to that first book, a prequel that was all about Jessie and Ollie's lives together.

These were the things that consumed me at thirteen. These were the lives I wanted to live. Even if I wasn't like the Jessie Roberts in the story and even if I didn't have my Ollie, I could have the life Jessie Roberts lived after she moved away. I was convinced of it. And when my parents took my brother and I on vacation to Charlotte, I was undeniably hooked. I wanted it, wanted it, wanted it.

I sent away for the literature for the UNC system. I planned and daydreamed and told everyone they should spend all the time with me they could because in a few years I was going to be long gone. After I got in a huge fight with Tammy, I would sit in homeroom each morning and seethe, Just wait. I'm going to go off and make something of myself, and I'm going to be friends with all the racers we love the most. I'm going to marry and have babies with one of them. I bet then you'll feel pretty sad you're not my friend anymore.

I eventually got over the whole idea of moving to North Carolina to become a sports journalist. I'd taken several journalism classes and ran the newspaper before realizing I actually hated writing news stories, that it was boring, that I spent most of my time dreaming up stories about characters who stumbled and were knocked around by life, and that was the stuff that was really interesting.

I haven't really regretted my decision. I haven't ever really looked back and had a big what could've been sigh over my lost swank apartment, my lost racer husband, my lost racer friends, my lost lake house and yacht. But today I did have a moment while I sat grading essays in front of the race at Bristol where I looked at a girl--a very cool, very savvy girl pit reporter--and thought, That could've been me. She has it all: the racing background (father, brother, uncle who raced), the journalism degree, the long hair that would look so good blowing in a fast red car. She probably even has a boyfriend who races. Or she will soon. It's probably only a matter of time. One of those guys must look at her and think, My God, that's one cool girl. Because she is. Because I would be too, if I'd gone that route. But I didn't.

Still, I couldn't quite keep myself from daydreaming a little bit, from drifting away from those student papers for a few minutes to imagine where I would be, what I would be doing, and who I'd be dating if I'd taken that route, if I'd stayed the girl I was when I was thirteen.

Wherein He Breezes in and Does Strange Things (Like Always)

2007-03-24T10:12:00.000-05:00

It hasn't been a great day. Earlier I sat down with a fresh pile of essays from my students and the very first one I read was plagiarized. The student had gone to the internet, copied, pasted, slapped his name on the page, and handed it in. This was the very first paper I read. There are, like, seventy-nine to go.

That plagiarized paper didn't give me the greatest feeling about the day. In fact, I decided it was probably going to suck. I also decided there was no way to get through it (or, at least, get to the point in the night where I would be able to grade in front of the Sabres game and my future husband's slick moves) without a jug of wine. The wine rack was full of my father's merlots, so I put on some shoes and went to the liquor store. When I came back, toting three bottles of wine, my brother was sitting in the living room. He was watching Employee of the Month. He was guzzling DanActive yogurt.

"Hello," I said.

He looked at me.

"Hi," I tried again.

"Hey," he said, then turned back to Jessica Simpson's massive breasts as they took center screen.

"Nice car," I said. About a week ago, my brother went out with my mother's boyfriend and bought a car to replace the wheels he's had for the last three years. His last vehicle was a 1994 Nissan truck--tiny, silver, beat to hell. Adam got it from our uncle. He got it for $500.

After forking over the money for that truck, Adam spent a lot more to make it uniquely him. He painted the dashboard blue and orange. He bought special lights for the interior. He installed a flashing bulb for the end of his shifter. He hooked up an expensive CD player, which was promptly stolen.

Eventually the truck started to fall apart. The transmission went, so did the radiator, so did the heat. This entire winter, my brother cruised around Buffalo without a working heater in his vehicle. He wore extra coats and gloves on the drive to work. He kept blankets behind the seat in case he had a long drive ahead of him.

But now he has a new car--well, a new used car. And this afternoon it was sitting in our driveway.

"Want to take me for a ride?" I asked. What I really wanted to say was, Can I take it for a spin? because I feel I am owed it. I have been a very giving sister when it comes to my car--letting that child have my keys, letting him drive it while I am out of town, letting him take it God knows where (Hooters? The strip clubs over the bridge in Ontario?). But as much as I wanted to ask him if I could drive, I didn't. I kept it in check. I told him to take me up and down our street.

"Alright," he said in that grudging way that was not grudging at all. Really, he'd probably been sitting there for twenty minutes hoping I'd hurry up, get home, and ask him if he'd take me for a spin.

He took me a mile up the road and let me ask him standard questions: How many cylinders does this thing have? (Four) What's your gas mileage like? (30 mpg, highway) How many times have you washed it since you got it? (Two)

Then Adam decided he'd had enough of driving me, that it was time to turn around and go back to the house so he could resume watching Jessica Simpson's breasts. He was also in the mood for some leftover stir-fry.

Of course, right now the countryside is swampy with spring. Shoulders and driveways are muddy lakes. And since he'd just washed the new car, he wasn't in the mood to get anything on it. So my brother slowed down, checked his mirrors for traffic, and then proceeded to do a six point turn to get us turned around.

I couldn't help myself. I laughed. I laughed a lot.

That's when he turned to stare at me. "What?" he demanded. "Just what's so funny about that?"

Vacation Snapshots

2007-03-21T22:48:00.000-05:00

Oh, the stories I have to tell--including one about a boy in the airport who was on his way to boot camp, a skateboarder with long, long hair who said to me, "Can you tell me the time?" and then, "Do you mind if I sit next to you for a little while?" He just about broke my heart, but that--and other things--will be revealed in time. For now, here's a quick look at some of the pictures from my spring break trip to Minnesota:

News from L'Etoile du Nord

2007-03-16T17:25:00.000-05:00

I am in Minnesota.

I arrived in Minnesota on Wednesday night, hours and hours later than I was supposed to. My flight out of Buffalo was canceled and the only thing the airline could do was give me a shrug, a grin, and a new ticket to, well, Atlanta. From Atlanta I would get on a plane to Minneapolis, they said. Doesn't seem right that you've got to go south to go north, they said, but it'll have to do. Then they told me I had to go out to the baggage claim, find my luggage, and check in all over again, and go through another bout of security--where, it turns out, I would be subjected to special selective screening and made to stand in a box that blew bursts of stinging air at me ("Close your eyes tight!" the security guard yelled to me as the doors swung closed) to see if any chemical particles blossomed in the air off of my clothes, hair, and skin. Afterward, my carry-on was torn apart and everything in it (camera, makeup, books, tampons) were swabbed and tested for explosive residue. It was a lovely day.

Since arriving, though, I have done the following things:

1. Watched Matt puke out the door of a moving car.
2. Gossiped over black beans and rice.
3. Eaten Jell-O shots that were molded in a deviled egg holder.
4. Drank cocktails from 4:00 PM to 2:00 AM.
5. Wrote limericks about Greg, scabies, skanky ladies, and all sorts of other things.
6. Learned new slang for vagina (quinny)
7. Watched Katy use JP's earrings as tassels such.
8. Petted the cornrowed head of a Midwestern farm boy.
9. Was yelled at by a man who owned a tattoo parlor.
10. Ate spiral mac-n-cheese at 3:00 AM.
11. Kept warm underneath a blanket (decorated with goldfish dressed up as sharks).
12. Had the new day greeted by Led Zeppelin on a hi-fi.
13. Ate 1,000 cream cheese wontons at my favorite Chinese restaurant.
14. Watched a certain someone turn all the ceramic duck ornaments in Target so that they appeared to be engaged in activities that would make any of us need to go to confession.

And there's more goodness to come.

A Real Human Girl

2007-03-12T19:55:00.000-05:00

I've said before that it took my brother an awful long time to resemble a real human boy. Adam went through an awkward phase. His awkward phase included such joys as acne in unfortunate places and--the real kicker--puffy nipples. The doctor explained that the puffy nipples were no big deal, that they were the byproduct of some sort of strange flux of hormones, that they would go away after awhile. Still, for several months, whenever my brother took off his shirt, there they were, those puffy nipples that looked like they belonged on the body of a thirteen year old girl.

There were other things, too. Incidents. The first involved a family reunion, a bag of golf clubs, a wayward swing by one of the cousins, and Adam's jaw that got knocked clear out of its socket and hung crooked from his face while the reunion and all its barbequed hamburgers were disbanded in favor of driving Adam to the emergency room. Once my family got him to the emergency room, the doctors wired Adam's jaw shut, and it stayed that way for months. He couldn't eat anything solid. We liquefied everything for him: spaghetti and meatballs, mac and cheese, beef stroganoff. He even went back to school with his jaw wired shut. We had to pack him special lunches, and he had to eat with the nurse every day to make sure he didn't choke. I remember feeding him a McDonald's french fry--a real treat--through the space in his teeth. He gummed at that thing like it was the best thing ever. Ambrosia! Heaven! A solid fry!

The other notable incident that shaped my brother's awkward period again involved a cousin, a wayward squirt of gasoline, and a bonfire. My brother had been standing too close to the edge of the flame, and when it roared up from the shot of gas, my brother's leg flared up with it. The skin and hair puckered. My brother screamed and screamed. And off he went to the emergency room one more time, where they treated him for burns, where they did the best they could with his leg. For years, his one leg was completely hairless and smooth, like a girl's or one of those cats you see--the ones who are all skin, no fur.

Adam did not have it easy. He had it worse than I did. And I have spent years watching him bumble through his awkward phase. I watched and watched and watched. Then, after I came home from Minnesota, I looked at my brother and said, "There. Finally. Almost a real human boy."

I had forgotten, though, how long it took me to look like a real human girl. Sure I've mocked myself considerably on this blog--oh, those old pictures!--but I never really sat around and thought about how long it took me to look the way I see myself in my head.

I was thinking about that a lot this weekend. When I was over at Amy and Becky's on Saturday--to celebrate Becky's 26th birthday bonanza--we stuffed ourselves full of tacos and then spread out on the living room floor. Then Amy put in a tape of her surprise birthday party from eighth grade.

Suddenly there we all were (well, not me--I was suspiciously missing from the party) on the screen. All our old friends were bouncing around in Amy's basement. They were singing. They were dancing. They were inhaling sugar as fast as they could get it clutched in their palms. Everyone was twelve, thirteen years old and wearing the best 90's apparel: scruchies and plaid shirts and boy jeans. It was really quite a sight.

"I'm HIDEOUS!" Becky shrieked.

"No, I'm HIDEOUS!" Amy shrieked.

I tried to tell them that, no, neither of them was hideous. That's just what thirteen year old girls looked like back then. We didn't wear short skirts or belly shirts. We didn't flounce around in the fashions we saw on the backs of Paris Hilton and Britney Spears. We emulated Angela Chase. We had her shirts, her pants, her baggy clothes. We were exactly what thirteen year old girls who didn't have boyfriends (and wouldn't for years) looked like at that point in time. The popular girls--the ones who were rumored to have lost their virginity in sixth grade, the ones whose boyfriends were the boys we had devastating crushes on--didn't exactly look like us, but that's because they were busy being popular, and we were busy practicing our slick dance moves or fake-singing into our fists or hairbrushes. I wouldn't trade a second of that, even if someone told me I could've had Ryan McLean for my boyfriend.

But somewhere along the way, all that "hideousness" fell away. Our voices changed, we got taller, we shopped for better clothes. We got better looking. We got a handle on ourselves. For some, though, it took longer than others.

Here, for example, is me in eleventh grade:

Of note: the mullet-ish hairdo, the bloated face, the untamed eyebrows, the hideous vest. I look like I've been asleep for fifty years. I look sad and boyfriendless. I look a little bit like I might never come out of it.

But then, then, then, there was some sort of transformation, some sort of something that took place in my body over the course of a few months, something that took me from a girl with a shaggy mullet to this:

A real human girl.

(For the most part.)

(And, for those of you who are keeping score, the girl on the right is my former best friend, the girl who cried when I told her I lost my virginity.)

Being Honest

2007-03-11T20:48:00.000-05:00

The other day I spent far too much time combing through photos of myself. I was looking through these photos to please my mother, to give her one of these photos so she could pass it on to the boy she wants me to meet and fall for. I had to look at all the pictures with a critical eye, an eye that asked Does that smile make me look fun or schizophrenic? and Does my face look even more horse-faced than usual?

After going through each of my albums and discarding possible photo choices for bad hair days, way-too-toothy smiles, and bad angles, I finally realized what a joke it all was. One photo to sum me up? One photo to convince a guy that I am fun and not completely unfortunate looking? It's too much pressure. Too much. And if I was really being honest, I would send a picture that had much less perfection in it, a picture that showed my true colors. Possibly a picture like this:

That's a picture that says a lot. It says, for instance, Dear Boys, this is what you would have to put up with if you dated me. As is evident in this photo, I like the following things: good earrings and silicone pot holders shaped like pigs. Love, Jess.

It's quite a bit more honest than some of the other pictures I chose. Quite, quite a bit.

The Hookup

2007-03-08T14:56:00.000-05:00

This is what my mother says to me this afternoon: "Don't you want to meet our friends' attractive son? We could go out to a fish fry tomorrow night. Or maybe I could slip him your e-mail address the next time I see him. Or maybe we should print off a picture of you. Yes, maybe that's what we should do. You decide on a picture, print it out, write your name and e-mail and phone number on the back, and I'll bring it to him. That's a good idea."

I ask her if I should write my height and weight, my likes and dislikes on the back, too. "You know," I say. "Long walks on the beach, sponge candy..."

"Listen," she interrupts, "I'm just worried he's going to meet some other girl before he meets you. He's such a nice boy, Jess."

My mother sounds so sincere and a little heartbroken--as if she's imagining the friends' attractive son meeting some girl, falling for her, bringing her to the next bowling party--and that's why I say okay, okay, I'll do it. I'll find a picture. I'll write my name and e-mail and phone number on the back. I'll sit around try not to think how sort of lame that makes me seem, how desperate. My mother, after all, thinks it is a good idea. My mother also thinks that her boyfriend's gay black belt son is not gay, so her judgment can sometimes get iffy, but I want to make my mother happy. She's mostly stopped giving me the normal pep-talk, the one that involves her saying things like you're actually lucky you're single and everything will work out in its own time. Now sometimes when she looks at me I think it looks like my mother is wondering if she gave that pep-talk a little too fervently, if she's worried I'm actually starting to believe I'm lucky and that things will come my way if I just wait around all patient-like.

This attempted hookup smacks of disaster. Any attempted hookup that involves me smacks of disaster.

Katy once tried to get me interested in one of her husband's friends. He worked in some sort of meat-packing plant. He had a child. He drove a purple Grand-Am, which--if I remember correctly--had pink flames on its side. He had nine and a half fingers--a result of a tragic accident at the meat-packing plant.

Katy also tried to get me interested in another of her husband's friends. This one lived in a trailer, didn't own silverware, didn't do dishes except for once a month (if you were lucky), slept with every dirty girl and stripper in town, and got fired from a job--even the Happy Chef--every few months.

My uncle has tried. My mother has tried. My cousins have tried. My friends have tried. It has only worked once. Once.

That once was Ex-Keith. He'd seen me once at a party thrown by mutual friends. He liked what he saw, and he asked his best friend about me. His best friend asked his girlfriend, who was my best friend's sister. Then, at a baby shower thrown for my best friend's other sister--who had, consequently, been knocked up by a man who moved away with his gay lover several months later--my best friend's non-pregnant sister, the one who was dating Keith's best friend, grabbed me by the arm and towed me into their parents' bedroom. The bedroom was small and cramped. I felt a little nervous. The sister was looking at me with big eyes, telling me she had something to tell me, to ask me.

"What?" I asked. "Just what?"

Then she told me about Keith, how he thought I was cute, how he wanted to take me out. "I know it's all very overwhelming," she said, "so I thought maybe we'd all go on a date together. A double date. Very low pressure."

A week later I was sitting across from Keith at an Olive Garden in his hometown. I was eating chicken parmesan and praying I didn't get a little crazy with the knife, send a hunk of the chicken catapulting into my lap. Later that night Keith and I stood awkwardly at the foot of the sister's car while she and her boyfriend said goodbye with loud, loud kisses. I told Keith I had fun. I was shivering. I was thinking low pressure my ass. That's when Keith put his arm around me, tipped my chin up for a kiss. And that's when I realized it was all worth it, that things were going to be okay.

So maybe someone will have that kind of success with me again. Maybe someone will find me a boy who will give me his coat because it's just so cold out, it's starting to snow, and the sister and her boyfriend won't stop making out. Maybe someone will find me a boy who will take me to the bottom of a ski hill at the end of the night--just when everyone is doing their last runs before slipping out of their skis, just when everyone is doing their fanciest, most elaborate, best moves of the night. And maybe this boy will sit there with me and tell me all his best stories until it's late, until they're shutting the lights off and the whole world goes dark right there in front of us. Maybe I can have that sort of luck again. Maybe it can start this way. Maybe it can start with a picture and my name and e-mail and phone number on the back.

Maybe.

No Matter What They Say, I Still Think "Purity Balls" Sounds Dirty

2007-03-05T23:33:00.000-05:00

I've been grading papers for the last forever. I've been grading papers so long that my brain feels like it's turned to mush. Strings of words dry up on my tongue when I try to speak. I'm spelling things wrong. My thoughts never bloom the way they're supposed to--instead, they just shrivel up in some dank corner of my brain.

Tonight I took a break from the grading to sit in the living room and eat dinner with my father. He wanted to watch the news. I said fine. I would've agreed to anything at that point. He could've said, "Jessica, I'd like to watch a video of a frog being blown up on a hot plate, and I'd like to watch it on repeat," and I would've said, "Sure, Dad. Great."

But he didn't say that. Instead, he flicked to the news, and we watched and chewed and grumbled about things we didn't like. When the anchor came back to throw it to commercial, that's when she gave us the teaser for what was coming up: a segment on purity balls.

"Purity balls?" my father asked. He made a face. He pretended to be shocked and scandalized, like purity balls was the name of some new over-the-counter erectile dysfunction medicine. Who needs Viagra when you can have Purity Balls?!

Turns out purity balls are not so much erectile dysfunction pills as they are excuses to fluff your little girls into poofy gowns, excuses to slip on their patent leathers, excuses to get your husband's tux steamed. Purity balls are really father-daughter dances for the Christian crowd. Girls wear miniature wedding dresses and sign purity pledges. No way, no how are they going to lose their virginities. Nuh-uh. These little girls don't care how cute Tommy McMurray is going to look after the homecoming game junior year. They don't care that they'll say, Okay, Tommy when Tommy says, "Let's go for a ride, you and me." They don't care that he'll put a blanket on the hood of the car and kiss them under the stars until they're so dizzy they can't tell where their bodies leave off and the night sky begins.

The teaser video showed a beautiful blond girl tippy in heeled shoes. Her golden curls cascaded down her back, bounced against the milky fabric of her white ball gown. "I made a promise to God," she said. She beamed. "I'm going to stay pure until my wedding night. My daddy's here to sign a promise to protect me and be a good male role model." And there was dear old dad: towering above his daughter, yanking on his bow tie, looking nervous about all that.

Ick, I thought to myself. Ick, ick, ick.

I tried to picture myself in one of those little-girl-dresses. I tried to picture myself flouncing around with a new purse and a new hairdo. I tried to picture myself telling my father I was so happy he was there to celebrate my virginity with me. We'd get to take our pictures in front of the purity backdrop: a swirly blue background with a wooden cross looming behind us. We'd eat mashed potatoes and carved ham from the buffet station. We'd dance to Frank Sinatra songs sung by a sweaty wedding singer wearing too much spandex. I pictured discussing the significance of the event with my father--which would mean, really, I'd be discussing sex with the man who still makes me uncomfortable if he's sitting in the same room as me when a love scene comes on. I'd be discussing it at twelve years old. Ick.

I'd like to think I would've been a savvier little girl than the ones who get cajoled into going to these purity balls. After all, when we were in high school and my friends were saying I'm not having sex until after I walk down the aisle or Blowjobs are gross, and I'll never give one or On top? Gross. I'll never be on top, I was the one saying, "Well, I'm pretty sure I'm going to give all those things a go, so good luck to you."

Even before I'd been touched by a boy, even before I'd been looked at by a boy in a way that didn't involve revulsion, I still knew things were coming, they were just around the corner, and boy were they going to be good. I'd done my tour of Sunday school. I'd promised to remain faithful and shining and golden for the Lord. I'd let priests smear ash on my head. I'd let them dash me with holy water. I'd gone through everything I was supposed to, but I could still feel reality nagging at me like a canker sore in the farthest, most unreachable part of my mouth. It was an itch that didn't go away.

So I'd like to think I would've been the little girl who would've sat her father down on the bed, put his fancy bow tie away, and told him it was okay, we didn't need to go to the ball, didn't need to make promises we couldn't and wouldn't keep. I'd like to think I would've been the little girl who would tell him there were mistakes to be made, and it was okay. Things would go wrong and I would make the wrong decisions, but all of that--all my mistakes--would be okay. They'd be stupid beautiful mistakes, and they would spin me into the stars, clear up into the chalky mist of the Milky Way, and really, that wasn't such an awful place to be.

But I would've told him we were keeping the dress.

Jess: Now with More Bang

2007-03-01T10:30:00.000-05:00

There comes a point in a girl's life where she needs a change, something's gotta give, big things have to happen. Maybe she's going on spring break--ironically to a place that's actually colder than where she lives now--in two weeks. Maybe she's sick of looking in the mirror and thinking blah. Maybe she lets her best gay friend--the one who's always lecturing her on serum (You need serum in your hair, Jess! Serum!)--talk her into going to his hairdresser. Maybe she feels a little reckless, a little like the time she had a hair appointment before she went out with New Boy for the first time, and she says the same thing she said then: "Do what you think will make me look best."

Maybe she gets bangs. Maybe she gets really cute bangs:

I'm pretty sure after I get my eyebrows waxed next week, I am going to rule the world.

The Headlines Will Read Bootsie Smith Weds Taffy Miles

2007-02-27T12:16:00.000-05:00

This is what my father has told me ever since he and my mother got divorced: "I will never get married again. I'm done. It no longer interests me."

This is what my father told me last week when he called from Florida, where he was vacationing with his lady love: "I'm getting married."

This news struck me as surprising for several reasons. First, I've had his I'm never getting married again mantra driven into my head for the last seven years. Second, he never mentioned a thing about it. He was stealthy in his secrecy, a regular James Bond--just without fancy gun-pens or floating cars.

As soon as he told me, I hung up the phone and called Amy and Keith to break the news. "How do we feel about this?" I asked.

Amy was happy. "When's the wedding?" she exclaimed. I could tell she was seeing summer dresses and strappy shoes and another reason to drink Bacardi-Cokes in the warm summer afternoon. I could tell she was thinking, Yessss. We get to see the girlfriend's hot son in dress-up clothes! I could tell she was thinking that because I was thinking that, too.

Keith was happy, too, but for different reasons. The news meant he could gloat. He'd been predicting this for months, and I'd been repeating the same words my father had drilled into my head since the divorce. "No, Keith," I would say. "He's never getting married again. He told me so. They might live together, but that's it."

"We'll see," Keith would say in one of those irritating sing-song voices. "We'll just see about that!"

When I told him the news, Keith yelled into my ear. "Ha!" he said. "I told you so!" Then he said, "Can I sleep with your mom now?" and I had to inform him that no, he could not sleep with my mother now. He couldn't sleep with my mother ever, no matter how much he might want to or how much he liked to say that to irritate me.

They both went on to ask me how I felt. How was I dealing with it? What did I think?

I felt fine with it. I like my father's girlfriend. He's had some girlfriends I really wasn't fond of--for example, the girlfriend I nicknamed Rafiki because she resembled the blue-butted monkey from The Lion King--but this one is an all-around good time. And she has a hot son. Really, it's a win-win situation for everyone. So, I feel good about this. I am happy for my father, happy that he gets a second-go at marriage, even if that's what he spent years thinking he didn't want.

Really, I suppose, there were hints, and I should've seen this coming. About a month ago my father walked into the kitchen balancing his and my mother's wedding album on his palm. "I think," he said, "it might be time to get rid of this."

"Are you freaking kidding me?" I exclaimed, snatching the album from him. I could see him tossing it in the garbage. I could see the album getting buried in the landfill, underneath a cascade of rotten bananas, socks with holes in the heels, forgotten furniture. I told my father I was taking over custody of the album, and I pushed it underneath my bed, where it would be safe forever.

He must have been considering it--a new start with a new woman--for awhile now, and if I had paid closer attention maybe I would've guessed it. But that's okay. The surprise was fine. And last night I decided it was extra fine because we all sat around figuring out our porn-names, and my father's would be Bootsie Smith and his girlfriend's would be Taffy Miles, and let's face it--that's a good-sounding couple. I can see the invitations, the headlines now: Bootsie Smith Weds Taffy Miles; Children Smoky Place, Dusty Place, and Squeaky Kelly Throw Reception in Their Honor.

Let's hope, though, that my father picks a more attractive outfit and hair situation than he did the first time around, when he married my mother:

Back to an Old Place

2007-02-24T11:57:00.000-05:00

Well, I thought to myself, that sure looks familiar.

This was yesterday, when I was killing time in between two of my classes. I was sitting upstairs in a lounge with broke-down couches. I was leafing through the papers I'd just gotten from my students when two of them slumped down onto the couch across from me. "Hi!" they said, and they smiled.

One of the students was a boy, the other was a girl. The boy is the type that qualifies as Really Attractive--a little on the short side, but otherwise brilliant. His skin is tan, the power of his smile could be measured in wattage, his eyes are the type of blue that guarantees he will often get laid even if he has no other redeeming qualities than those eyes. The girl is short and spunky. She's always willing to participate. She always says goodbye and have a nice day to me as she leaves the classroom. Her hair is jet-black, her lips are always perfectly glossed.

This girl and her other beautiful short friends are in love with this boy. They surround him in class. They are always giggling and batting their eyes and tossing their hair and finding reasons to touch him on the shoulder, on the arm, on the thin bones of his hand. No one finds more reasons to touch him than the girl with the jet-black hair.

When they spread themselves out across the couch yesterday I pretended it was no big deal, that I could care less that they were sitting across from me. I went on looking at the papers. I pretended I wasn't eavesdropping.

I was completely eavesdropping.

She asked him if he was going to come out to the bar with them later that night.

"Maybe," he said. He didn't look at her straight on.

"Oh come," she said. "It's going to be fun."

"We'll see," he said. Then he made a phone call. Someone was waiting for him in the union. They had homework to copy. He said he'd be over soon.

That was when the girl tipped her body closer to his. She leaned in. Her posture was screaming Stay! Stay! Stay!

They talked for a few more minutes. They laughed and swatted at each other. When he smiled at her the light from his perfect, perfect smile was unbearable. I knew exactly where this was headed.

Finally, he started to gather his things.

"You're going?" she asked.

"I've got to," he said. Then they sat there for a minute, just looking at each other. In complete silence. She smiled, but it wasn't so much a smile as it was a thin line cutting across her face. He reached over and touched her cheek with the back of his hand. Her body swelled. You could actually see it. Her entire self bloomed. He was touching her. My God, he was touching her like that. But then he rose, and her body deflated, collapsed in on itself. "See you later," he said.

She watched him leave, watched him walk down the hall and far away from her. He never looked back.

When he rounded the corner toward the elevator, the girl slouched over. She put her head in a pillow of her hair and hands. I thought maybe she was going to cry. I wanted to put my folders and notebooks away and go sit next to her on the couch. I wanted to gather her up--all that jet-black hair and loose, broken limbs--and hug her, tell her it was okay, he was gone, she should just cry, get it out, get it over with. I imagined what I could tell her. "I've done this before," I would say. "I know it feels like your heart is too big for your chest right now. I know you think it's possible you could die from this feeling, from loving him too much, from him not loving you enough or at all." I felt for her.

What I was feeling most wasn't understanding or sympathy, although they were certainly there. I wasn't thinking, You poor thing. Just cut and run, and do it quickly. No. What I was thinking and feeling as I sat there watching her finally sit up and lean backward, close her eyes, and pretend to sleep--which is infinitely better than crying in front of your English teacher--well, what was going on inside of me was much more complicated, much darker than all that. I was thinking, I'd give anything to go back--to even the worst times, the times where I cried in my car, in bar bathrooms, on my own bathroom floor--just so I could love a person that way again.

While I watched her breathe and try to keep the tears locked behind screwed-shut eyelids, I thought about two Septembers ago, a day I drove up to the place the Wily Republican had moved to after he graduated. He and I had lain on his bed and looked at each other for a long time. Things were said, I'm sure, but I don't remember them. We were holding hands in that way you hold hands in high school: fingers twisted into fingers. Later, we watched television and sat on separate couches. When I went to leave, he walked me to my car. We both stood in front of the driver's side door.

"Thanks for coming," he said.

"Sure," I said, like it was no big thing, when in reality I'd spent an hour picking an outfit, gotten a haircut, and arranged my day around the drive up to his place. He'd moved in the middle of that summer. I'd helped him pack boxes and load his car. I'd folded and stacked clothes. I'd searched for the lids to his grungy Tupperware. I'd waved goodbye, goodbye, goodbye. For the rest of that hot Minnesota summer I sat on the edge of the local pond and repeated song lyrics in my head. I'm wishing my summer away just to see you again, I sang. And I did. I wished my way into July and August and straight into September.

The moon was rising over his shoulder. The night was quiet. I could hear only two things: my heartbeat and the hum of the distant highway traffic. It was an important moment, although I shouldn't have known that then. I shouldn't have known that a few weeks later the Wily Republican would call me up, say he had something to tell me. A terrible, awful something. But somehow I did know.

I wanted to stall. I wanted to keep him outside forever. I wanted him to say, "Let's sit in the car for a little bit." I wanted him to say, "Stay the night, okay?"

I would've. I would've stayed the night, the week, the month, the year. At that one moment in time I would've dropped out of school and left everything behind if he'd just asked me to.

But he didn't. Instead, he picked me up in his arms. I balanced on my toes and he hugged me. He crushed me underneath the weight of his arms, and we stayed like that while the traffic continued to hum, while the moon slid in and out of a veil of clouds. His hand was moving slowly against my shoulder blade. He drew circles against my skin. "Goodbye," he said. "Drive safe."

Then he let me go, let me down. He backed away from me. He waved. Then he turned around and walked away. I eased into my car and turned the key. I watched him go. He never looked back. Several weeks later he called, told me about this girl he'd met, how he was going to give it a go. I could still feel the circles he'd drawn on my freckled shoulder blade. They burned while I cried and cried and he said, "I didn't mean to do this. I really didn't."

But he did. And so did I. And my students were doing it, too. I could see it clear as day. I could see my own face in hers, the Wily's in the boy's. I saw us looking at each other and smiling and running around town and laughing and letting the snow fall down onto us.

And I could've whispered, "I know what you're going through, so let me give you some advice..." and then told her to stop answering his calls, to sit on the other side of the room during class, to tell him she was busy and couldn't see him right now. But I didn't want. I knew it was too important that she go on loving him and that he go on doing what he was doing. I knew there were too many lessons she had to learn about love and what it should be and--more importantly--what it shouldn't be.

A Note for Crazy Dave

2007-02-23T12:41:00.000-05:00

I can't help but think that Crazy Dave would have enjoyed leaving his favorite waitresses sexually-explicit notes on these.

Crazy Dave

2007-02-21T16:41:00.000-05:00

I met Crazy Dave when I was nineteen years old. I was a waitress wearing khaki pants and a jean shirt. He was a cook wearing sagging jeans and a black t-shirt that stretched against the strain of his enormous gut. Crazy Dave wore hats in the kitchen. He tied a stained white cloth around his middle. He liked to talk about which waitresses he'd sleep with and how, his bowel movements, his ex-wife, his "hot daughter," and even his hot daughter's friends.

If Crazy Dave was making a dinner plate for someone he didn't like--a customer who gave sass, a waitress he loathed, a dishboy he wanted dead--then he would stick his hand down the back of his pants, into his underwear, and let it squirm around in there until the shrieking of the other cooks, waitresses, and dishboys grew too loud to be contained by the swinging metal doors.

If ants got into the pie--because sometimes waitresses were lazy and left pies uncovered in the cooler--Crazy Dave said, "Eh, just flick 'em off and cover it with whipped cream. No one will know."

Crazy Dave liked to fart and burp and make foul noises. He liked to yell. He liked to say fuck! and fuck you! and stupid fucking fucker!

The dishboys liked Dave. "Wow, Dave is so cool," they would say. "Dave's the best! Isn't he just so great?"

The waitresses liked Dave's alfredo sauce. He was in charge of the saute pans on Friday and Saturday nights. He made a chicken alfredo or a shrimp scampi like no one's business. "Dave's alfredo is top-notch," the waitresses would say. "Nothing else like it in the world!"

Crazy Dave was rumored to have been in jail, to be on probation, to have killed a man, to have busted up his ex-wife's car with a baseball bat. When the waitresses bent over to get bread or salad, Crazy Dave liked to yelp. Now that's a juicy ass! he'd say.

I knew enough to stay out of Dave's way. I didn't want to be on his Most Hated list, and I certainly didn't want to be on his Most Beloved List. The waitresses on the latter list were subject to his persistent offers of sex--oral, anal, and otherwise--and to a towel-whip when they happened by his station.

I never bothered Dave, and Dave never bothered me. Of course, that's not to say Dave didn't disturb me. Because he did. Often.

One time I was making a tray of salads for a big party that was coming in later that night. I had the salads lined up and was methodically thunking chick peas, cucumbers, tomatoes, onions, cheese, and croutons onto the chilled plates. Dave was behind the line, bitching about this and that, saying how much of a whore his ex-wife was, and how everyone in this restaurant was a no good fucking fucker. Then an order for an alfredo came in. That put Dave to work. He was no longer idle and aimless, and he did his best work when he was talking, so he started spinning his story. The pans sizzled over the heat and the smell of garlic rose in the kitchen.

He told the other cooks that because his daughter was hot, she had hot friends. Hot young friends. They were fourteen, fifteen, maybe sixteen years old. He had a little trick he liked to pull on them, he said. He'd drink a couple beers, draw himself a bath, stack the cans next to the tub and pretend to pass out in the warm water. If they stayed long enough, the hot young girls eventually had to go to the bathroom. But what could they do? Crazy Dave only had one bathroom. One tiny bathroom. So they waited and prayed he'd get out or wake up, but when it became apparent that he wouldn't--he must have had an awful lot to drink, the hot young girls thought--they just tip-toed in and pulled down their jeans, their pink and purple and polka-dotted underwear. Crazy Dave watched all this through narrowly slitted eyes. He watched the parade of pink and purple and polka-dotted underwear and thought, Ah, now this is the life.

I was thinking about all this today--Crazy Dave, the restaurant, his stories--because my students read a story about a strange workplace and strange coworkers. They journaled about the strangest person they'd ever worked with. And I just let them talk. There were so many stories, so many interesting stories. There were knife-throwing dishwashers, there were transsexuals, there were pizza throwers who'd drink bottles of vodka during their shifts. There were people who groped, people who punched, people who stole drugs and condoms and frozen donuts.

And my God, I couldn't get over it--how there are some really bizarre people out there, how they are, at this very minute, turning small circles in our lives--preparing our meals, cashing our checks, sliding our purchases over scanners, fielding our phone calls. I couldn't stop thinking about motivation, about what makes them the way they are--from the disgusting to the perverse--and I couldn't help but wonder how many bad days, how many strikes of bad luck, we are all away from throwing knives or stealing frozen donuts. Somedays I feel like I could. I have a stack of papers to grade this weekend. Sometimes that's enough to do it.

The Man I Will Never Get Over

2007-02-19T23:29:00.000-05:00

I have a lot of bad habits (ignoring dishes, not filing important papers, losing my mind when boys mimic me in those high-pitched screechy voices they always do when imitating women), but another is this: I have a bad habit of falling in love with some (a lot) of the male characters I write.

This isn't love in that creepy I've-lost-sense-of-reality kind of way where I carry on conversations with the characters in my head, where I think they're somehow going to materialize in my living room and say, "Come on, Jess, we're going out for a nice steak dinner." I have a grip. I have control. I also have my sanity. My love for these characters is hypothetical. It's a love that says, If these characters were real men in your life, you wouldn't stand a chance. Not a single chance.

This weekend I started writing a new story with a whole new boy that I first thought was going to be one way--disgusting, foul, and shady--but turned out much different than all that. Suddenly there was a scene that showed him as vulnerable, damaged, and even noble. The whole story changed. The whole story got better. And I was in love.

I think that's how I like my men: with bite and bent and attitude. I like my men to come from bad places so they appreciate what they have, so they will fight if anyone ever tries to take it away from them. And so that's who often shows up--whether I want them to or not--in stories I write.

But no one ever showed up more than Oliver Covet. I will never be able to stop thinking about Oliver Covet: tall, blond, perfect hair, worked-in jeans, a hammer in his hand.

Ollie came around when I was twelve years old. He just showed up because I had started writing a story about the girl I always wanted to be: the daughter of a racing tycoon. My childhood had been soaked in the boozy-smokey world of auto racing. My mother owned a NASCAR memorabilia store, my father took me to the local track on Saturday nights, and my best friend's father had a race team of his own. I once stood in their garage and helped to rub the lettering of the driver's name on the car's roof. I wished and wished and wished that the name could be my name on my own car that I would get into on Saturday, a car I would drive hard and bang up and win with.

I never would get it, and I knew it, so I wrote about it instead. I created my perfect world. I created a prissy mother who was depressed her daughter was a tomboy, a father who was pleased about it, and a raggedy crew of attractive boys who fixed the car. I created a better version of me. I created Jessie Roberts: smartassed, tough, sarcastic, beautiful, worshipped, uncontainable. Then I created the world's best man to head up the crew of attractive boys. I created Ollie: tall, with long blond hair and blue eyes, the only boy who knew how to reign in Jessie Roberts, the only boy who ever saw her cry.

I could go on about Ollie Covet for hours, days, weeks, months. It's a strange combination: I feel proud because he's mine, I created him, and I put him together with my own two hands; I also feel like I wish he would materialize out of the thin air and tell me we're going out for a nice steak dinner, then we're going shopping for wedding rings. I'd marry Ollie Covet in a New York minute. In a hot, hot second.

I thought about Ollie Covet a lot over the last few days. For one thing, I spent half my day on Sunday in front of the television, watching the Daytona 500. For another thing, Diana sent me an e-mail this morning about the newest onslaught of Harlequin books--they'll feature racing themes and "appearances" from real-life drivers. It made me angry to think of that. I wanted to yell at the authors of those books, to tell them they couldn't possibly be accurately portraying what it's like to love the institution of auto racing, to love its roots and legacy, to love the boys who slip themselves into those tenuous sheet metal shells week after week. The Harlequin stories, I was sure, would be goofy and gross. They would feature silly, giggly, wormy girls who would know nothing about racing yet they would end up bagging the hottest racer around. They would say, "I just don't get what you do! Will you explain it to me again?" Jessie Roberts would never be a silly, giggly, wormy girl. She wouldn't stand for anything like that. Her story would be so much more compelling, so much more real.

Both of those things worked me into an Ollie overload, but one more thing threw me right over the edge. This weekend Amy and I, in our quest to see as many Oscar-nominated films and performances as possible before the ceremony--watched Half Nelson. In it, Ryan Gosling is scruffy and lost and vulnerable. He is beautiful, one of the world's most beautiful boys. And that's when I realized it. He could be Ollie. He could be Ollie with no problem, with very little effort. I'd never been able to pin that down before. I'd never been able to say, "Oh, in a perfect world where they turned this story into a movie, so-and-so would play Ollie." I thought a younger Matthew McConaughey might've been able to pull it off, but that line of thinking was never quite right. Ollie would be a little grittier, a little tougher, a little less perfect.

So this weekend when I looked at the screen I saw, for the first time ever, Ollie Covet looking back at me. And I thought Oh God and Wouldn't it be nice and Jesus. I thought it was perfect, that Ryan Gosling's body and face could be Ollie's body and face, and if we could just scoop up all the words and details and images I'd ever written about Ollie Covet then somehow pour them into Ryan Gosling--well, that would be it for me. That would be my man, my love, the one thing I would never quite stop thinking about.