Onward, Upward

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.

Ready to See Some Moose

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.

Reasons to Love Buffalo

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.

Playoffs: Game One

We won, we won, we won.



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

Banned: Driving

Today my drive home was a sixty minute drive that took me from the city of Buffalo, whose roads were completely dry and clear, to this town in the middle of ski country that looks exactly the way it looked when I left it at 7:00 AM: snowy hell.

Today on my drive home a snowmobile roared past a line of slow-moving cars. I was in that line of slow-moving cars, somewhere in the middle, behind a Blazer that boasted a MY SON IS IN THE US NAVY bumper sticker. The snowmobile, which I had seen in my rear view mirror, pulled into the other lane and zipped past, raising a plume of snow and flurry behind it. The roads were perfect for snowmobiling: a compressed coating of snow, no visible pavement, no nothing. We drove forty miles an hour the entire way home.

When I went to bed last night, a lake effect snow band had been dumping snow onto western New York--specifically the south towns of Buffalo--for three days straight. It was getting bad out, and I didn't know if I should cancel class or not. Several of the towns I'd need to travel through the next morning had issued travel bans. The major highway I needed to use to get to both colleges where I teach was closed. But I went to bed on the assumption it would be open by the time I woke up.

It was. So I got ready, packed my bags, warmed up the car, packed myself a snack, and went on my way.

I have no idea why they opened that road. It was ridiculous. The plows had been on it, sure, but there was barely a clean swatch of road. The snow had come down so hard then frozen in sheets over the last few days that there were giant divots in the snow pack that covered the road, which had to terrorize every suspension that rumbled over it. I felt like I had gotten stuck on some clackity amusement park roller coaster--a wooden one, half broken, half ready to fall off the tracks.

But I kept on. I kept on because I had a class to teach at 8:00 AM, and I wasn't going to leave my students without a teacher. This class is at a community college, and my students are an eclectic mix: mothers with daycare issues, guys with full-time jobs. I didn't want to inconvenience them by making them come in when they could've stayed home, paid the babysitter one hour less, gotten some extra sleep, accomplished some extra work for the job.

I was almost late. I dashed from the parking lot across a couple one-way city streets and up the stairs to the front door. I tore around the corner and up the stairs. Four flights of stairs. And when I pushed into the classroom--which has an old US postal safe, complete with a bristling and patriotic-looking eagle painted across it, mainly because the building used to be the city's postal headquarters--there were only two students sitting in the classroom. It was 8:00. They stared at me. I stared at them. I thought about my warm bed back at the house, about how I could've stayed in that very bed for several more hours because it was evident we weren't going to get any great amount of learning done with only a couple students present. I was a little angry--after all, Buffalo was clear, clear, clear. Not a flake of snow in the air. Not an unplowed street to be seen. The only thing the city was dealing with was a -20 wind that was whipping off the lake.

Later, after I drove to my other college where I would teach three more classes, one of my students--a repeat, a boy I wrote a letter of recommendation for, a boy who refers to me as Miss Jess! Miss Jess! Miss Jess!--looked at me with big sad eyes.

"You couldn't cancel class today?" he asked.

"Please," I said.

"But weren't there travel bans?" he asked.

"Yes," I said, "technically."

"And doesn't that mean no unnecessary travel?"

That's when I smiled at him and the rest of the class, told them to open their notebooks so we could start the day. "Oh, trust me," I said. "You're necessary."

World's Best Excuse to Dress Like a Pimp or Prostitute

As soon as I got my tickets for the World's Largest Disco I called my mother with a very important question. I wanted to see if she still had a pile of clothes leftover from the 70's—something she'd squirreled away, kept out of some strange love or obsession.

"Are you kidding me?" my mother said. "Gross. Why would I have any clothes left over from the 70's?"

Then I asked about my grandmother's three closets worth of clothes—the ones my mother had to comb through after her death. Surely there had to be something left from the 70's, something my grandmother found too precious or sweet or nice to get rid of. After all, my grandmother was The All Time Greatest Saver of Trivial and Strange Things, a skill she passed down to my mother, a skill that then got plugged into my DNA, a skill that explains why I still have the posterboard from a book report presentation Amy and I did in sixth grade.

But my mother had already donated anything that could've been useful to me. She'd taken bags and bags of my grandmother's old clothes to the Salvation Army. I was on my own with the outfit, but I figured my mother could still be some sort of help.

"What would you have worn to a disco?" I asked. "You know, back then? What kind of outfit would've been your first choice?"

That's when my mother rolled her eyes. "Jessica," she said, "I didn't disco. Disco was lame."

I beg to differ.

The five of us girls—my best girls Amy, Becky, and Steph, and Steph's college roommate Michelle—rented a hotel room for the night and arrived early so we could drink, eat pizza from Buffalo's best pizzeria, and get ready at our leisure:



That's Amy and Becky pre-getting ready. Shortly after this picture was taken there was a flurry of curling irons, aerosol hairspray, and blue eye shadow. We came out looking a little like so:



This is me and my naughty 70's girl pose. Not only am I channeling Jackie from That 70's Show, but I'm also channeling Farrah.



In the middle of doing her own version of 70's hair, Becky had to break it down for us.



A few minutes later, she came out looking like that. So Mary Tyler Moore!



And here's Michelle and Steph, who look so, so cool and aloof.



Becky and Amy did a little pre-disco posing.



Here's the whole group: Amy, me, Becky, Michelle, and Steph. I've come to this conclusion about high-waisted pleated pants: they aren't all that slimming.



The disco was held in the convention center, which was a quick walk down the street from our hotel. This was the same hotel that the Jacksonville Jaguars were staying in since they're in town to play the Bills today. We saw many—and one especially cute one—in the lobby.



We looked as good going as we did coming.



Once we got inside we drank wine from a box, saw some of the best costumes in the entire universe, and stumbled into pimps and sluts and go-go honeys and drunk 70's prom queens and guys who looked like they could've been the groomsmen at my father's wedding—frilly tuxedo shirts and all.



I don't know who this guy is, but he gave me a high five. He also spilled quite a bit of his drink on himself.



After the disco ended, we ran back to the hotel for a quick change so we could continue drinking and dancing downtown. Hot Rob graced us with some of his best white-boy moves.



Becky showed us her stuff, too.

So, really, I can't wait to call my mother and tell her how wrong she was and that discos are many things—including an excuse for every woman in Buffalo to put on dresses that barely cover the crests of their butts—but they are never, ever, ever lame.