Love at First Sloth

Essential Poe Facts

Very important facts about Edgar Allen Poe’s cottage in the Bronx:

There was no bust of Pallas above the chamber door, I am quite devastated to report.

There is this bust of Poe in the corner of the living room.

It's made of chocolate.

Poe rented the cottage for $100 a year from a farm.

The Bronx used to have farms, as well as forests.

Poe used to drink and play cards with the nearby Jesuit monks. Naughty.

According to the educational video played in a loop in the attic area, the cottage was built with high ceilings in order to conserve heat.

The low ceiling theory doesn't hold up – I nearly leaped over the barriers and lit a fire in the wood stove by rubbing together my dry, dry hands.

Poe had the best writing desk ever. Perhaps it’s a reproduction, but I don’t care. Just look at it.

Poe wrote next to this picture of penguins. You heard it here first.

Virginia Poe passed away in this bedroom.

After Virginia died, Poe wrote a prose poem called Eureka that anticipated the big bang theory.

The Bronx Historical Society volunteer guaranteed that if you read any sentence in Eureka, you will get a headache.

Poe was really, really depressed and thinking about Eternity when he wrote Eureka.

He considered it his magnum opus and submitted himself to death after writing it.

The educational video in the attic said that Poe spent the happiest years of his life there.

Ten minutes later it said they were the most excruciating years of his life. So which one is it?

Probably the latter.

The Ghosts of High School Past

When I think of English classes, I often think it’s a miracle that I still love reading. So many of the stories we read made me wish I could return to a state of illiteracy. But the thing about being literate is that you can’t go back – unless, of course, you crash a sled into a tree.

In elementary school we read inane stories out of reading textbooks and answered comprehension questions at the end (i.e. Why did the animals eat the pineapple?). They were written to educate us without causing us to enjoy ourselves too much. If it weren't for Harry Potter and the American Girls, I probably would have given up on reading and became an ignorant hooligan.

Some of the stories were intended to plant the seed of entrepreneurship in our impressionable young minds. One was a play about a young fellow who realizes that the price of toothpaste is too high, so he makes it from scratch with baking soda and peppermint oil. Other people also agree that toothpaste is too expensive, so they start buying jars of his homemade toothpaste. He turns his passion for cheap toothpaste into a toothpaste dynasty and becomes a millionaire.

I just thought to look up the story and it seems that it was a children’s book that must have been very loosely adapted for our workbooks. They cut out his female business partner, the lessons about gender, racism, and the true meaning of friendship, and the mathematical problems they must solve to become millionaires. It’s like they cut out all the potentially good parts from our textbook to focus on the logistics of making toothpaste.

One Amazon reviewer says this is the most important book he ever read. Well.

In high school, Ethan Frome was on our list of required reading. I feel like Edith Wharton personally ruined my life in a number of ways. She’s a woman writer and I want to like her because of that, but I resent that I had to sit through the mundane details of various miserable lives ending with a botched suicide. The title character and his love interest try to kill themselves by crashing a sled into a tree, but instead they just become horribly, horribly mangled. Sledicide is on par with leaping out a four story window or trying to overdose on children’s aspirin. Oh, Ethan and your half-brained schemes!

I reluctantly finished the book. Then I hurled it against the wall of my bedroom. If I have to pay a fine, so be it, I thought. I hate all these people.

One of the great things about life after school is that no one can make me read anything I don’t want to read. I was starting to get itchy about required reading at the end of college. In my last playwriting class, we were supposed to read plays and take an aspect of that play to write a scene. I mercilessly parodied the plays I didn’t like. As far as I’m concerned, a story that I think is awful only benefits me if I can make fun of it. My professor would ask, What did you think of this play? And I would say, I don’t like it. She would say, I don't care if you liked it, what did you learn?

Nothing! I learned nothing! I refuse to learn anything from this text, I cried indignantly. Then I stood up and flipped my desk.

Mexican Chocolate

After dinner tonight, I drank a cup of guahillo chili Mexican hot chocolate. There is nothing quite so fulfilling in cold weather as a spicy hot chocolate that singes your uvula just slightly.

I’ve wanted to try Mexican hot chocolate since I saw the movie Chocolat. (Thus begins a truly pathological paean). It reminds me of the scene where the Victorian explorer drinks pure cacao and realizes his true desires, which involve a voluptuous Mayan lass.

As a supermarket cashier, one of my personal goals was to try all of the chocolate in the organic and natural section of the supermarket. Goals such as these got me where I am today. Thus, I was introduced lavender chocolate and chocolate with hunks of raspberry and chocolate with chili peppers and anise seed chocolate and the highly addictive Green and Black’s 70%. I have since expanded to vegan chocolate and raw chocolate, but I could never find Mexican chocolate anywhere.

Luckily the chocolate gods finally decided to smile down upon me and by means of a Twitter contest, Taza Chocolate, and the Culinary Guild of New England, a sampling of Mexican chocolate was literally dropped upon my doorstep as if by angels. My package of chocolate disks contains a variety pack of salt and pepper, guahillo chili, coffee, and a few other exciting flavors. Using this recipe from Taza’s website, Dave and I turned the disks into Mexican hot chocolate.

First, kill the chocolate.

The recipe says to grate the disks, but lacking a grater, Dave simply chopped them up into slivers. I warmed the milk on the stove and stirred in the chocolate slivers. The result was delightful. I've been drinking a great deal of European sipping chocolate recently and it is quite a different experience.

European sipping chocolate is sweet and thick. It makes you feel like a young, wealthy Victorian woman in a swanky café having clandestine affairs with poor abstract artists. In short, European sipping chocolate makes me feel like Peggy Guggenheim. Mexican hot chocolate is deep and earthy and a little salty. It makes you feel like a swashbuckling adventurer who travels the world and eats guinea pigs beside campfires. In short, Mexican hot chocolate makes me feel like Jack Sparrow.

Boston Highlights

When we arrived at the station in Boston, my stomach growled and my head ached from whacking my head on the low overhang above the Megabus seats (something every Megabus passenger experiences at one time or another). Dave was sniffling from allergies and drowsy from napping in awkward positions over the sound of the archetypal crying infant on a bus. Yet in spite of waiting for an hour behind a sign on the sidewalk that read “Bostof,” we arrived at the intended destination.

Our trip was short – if it hadn't been, we would have been stuck in Boston through the duration of the hurricane. I certainly would not have complained.

Our first night, we went looking for some spectacular clam chowder. Quincy Market was all lit up like a Christmas tree. I described it to Dave as an endless food court with better food.

We found a little seafood restaurant called Boston Chowda and Dave ordered a bread bowl full of clam chowder. Dave decided it was the best clam chowder ever. Clam chowder makes me reminisce about a restaurant I used to go to with my Grandpa where bloated exotic fish blow kisses at you from behind an enormous glass tank as you slurp your soup.

A big sopping mess of chowder.

Dave and I resisted a multitude of candy coated brownies under glass cases and continued to the North End, the Italian neighborhood of Boston.

The main street was bustling, crowded with travelers, accordion players, and a clown twisting balloon animals. We were lucky to find a seat in a twenties-style café called Cafe Vittoria. Dave ordered a cappuccino with a frothy chocolate surface and I savored a square of tiramisu. Beyond the vintage signs and curling gold chairs a football game played in the background, confusing the ambience.

On our way back to the hotel that night we stopped to browse costumes and thrift shop clothes at the Garment District. The costumes were almost cleaned out but for a few mascot heads, fairy wings, and top hats. You could still get any size, shape, and color of fishnet tights you can imagine, but otherwise the Halloween hurricane had already come and gone. Savvy ladies dug through racks of vintage prom dresses and 70s skirts to construct Jackie O and Esmeralda costumes. Sequestered in a musty dressing room with a bulging stack of garments, I found the ideal sweater for a Cheshire cat costume. Halloween may have been derailed, but next year I’ll just need a pair of furry ears.

The second day was another food adventure. The Boston Vegetarian Food Festival deserved its own post, you can read about it here.

We walked to Boston Commons and the public garden. As we crossed Boston Commons we passed a man in a Dalmatian costume with three dogs in T-shirts. A one-man-band performed in the public garden, some amalgamation of a guitar, harmonica, drums set, trumpet, and a washboard. Dave fed the ducks in the pond some leftover cracker samples from the vegetarian fest, starting a feeding frenzy. We have more pictures of ducks eating crackers than anything else.

Dave photographed random strangers, perfecting the art of creeping around with a camera.

That night we went to Harvard Square for our next adventure. Our hotel was next to the MIT campus and as we walked around we assumed that every person our age must be someone brilliant studying quantum physics and neuroscience. It was much the same around Harvard, even with everyone dressed up as video game and Adventure Time characters.

We got a latte in the Harvard Coop, which turned out to be a poorly masked Starbucks within a poorly masked Barnes and Noble. In its defense, the coop really did contain real students quietly reading textbooks and looking rather tired.

We found a little shop with an impressive chocolate collection and I stumbled upon something I thought I would only see again in the Czech Republic – Mozart Kugeln. I bought two little pistachio truffles to be enjoyed on the ride home and reveled in Prague nostalgia.

I expected Harvard Square to be filled with shops and restaurants with names that allude to literature and the periodic table. In this I was not disappointed.

Science.

Dave and I had dinner in a bar called Grendel’s Den. Inside, Harvard students in costumes and funny hats drank beer in the reddish glow of the table lamps.

Dave had a steak with a Greek salad, prettily proportioned on the plate. I ordered Peruvian quinoa and got my first taste of chayote squash smothered in warm white cheese - easily my favorite meal in Boston.

A Pony Walks Into a Bar

*Produced in collaboration with Liza. Click here for context.

The Odyssey

No one can ever know what you have seen.

Directed by Michel Gondry

If my life were a movie, two things are for certain: it would be directed by Michel Gondry and star Michael Cera in a cascading blonde wig. It would probably focus on one rather banal day in my life, only in Gondry’s imagining everyone would have giant, inflatable hands. Dave would be played by Seth Rogen and Olive would be a robot. Every moment in my life up until page one of the script would exist solely to provide background for the script, and everything that happened post-page 120 would be unimportant. By the end of the film we would all see truths regarding relationships, art, and dreams.

The first act might begin with my first day of training at the yoga studio. As I travel to the yoga studio, following a crumpled page of directions, everything is just a little disorienting. For the first ten minutes of the film everyone on the bus is speaking to me in Spanish and I could certainly use a glance at the subtitles the audience is reading.

Once I finally find the studio, everything is peaceful. The studio director, played by Sylvie Testud, puts the phone to her chest and points for me to sit in an empty room across from the front desk. I leave my boots at the entrance and sit cross-legged on the floor. The room contains nothing but a room divider, an upright skeleton, and a system of ropes suspended from the wall. My face contorts as I scrutinize the system of ropes but my train of thought is quickly interrupted by a voice.

“Do you mind if I use the room?” a woman in the doorway says. She is very skinny and wears all gray. I nod and gather up my things so I can get out of her way. The woman tangles herself in the ropes and the gears behind her begin to turn. They are powered by some sort of Rube Goldberg machine: a mechanical hand dripping ice cold water from an infant medicine dropper onto the back of a dwarf hamster which runs on its wheel and propels a conveyer belt that rotates the gears of the rope system. It is Sylvie the studio manager’s invention. The ropes contort her body into impossible forms. I assume that she must be a teacher.

“What’s your name?” the woman asks me in a voice almost like a child.

“I’m Brittany,” I say. “What's your name?”

Her body is bent into a perfect triangle with bulging tendons and she looks at me from under her armpit.

“Marie.”

“I was wondering what this machine was for,” I say, taking a closer look.

“Do you want me to show you how to use it?” she asks.

She helps me twist the ropes around my arms and waist and before I know my body is out of my control. The ropes pull me into downward facing dog and I hang from my waist like wet rag, my fingers and toes dangling just above the ground.

“Keep your knees bent,” Marie says. “You aren’t warmed up yet.”

“Brittany, what are you doing? I’m ready for you now,” Sylvie says from the doorway. “And Marie, what are you doing in the teacher’s room?”

I untangle myself and drop to the ground.

Marie wanders into a classroom, where everyone is standing on their heads. When the door shuts, the studio manager turns to me.

“Just so you know, Marie is one of our more… difficult students. I've been putting up with her for a long time, but sometimes she just loses it and I have to ask her to leave. Usually she does this when the temperature isn’t exactly seventy-four degrees.”

Just then, Marie ambles out of the classroom with a pair of black goggles strapped to face. We both give Marie a strange look. The perspective shifts to Marie and we see everything through her infrared goggles. Sylvie and I are outlined in red blurs on a fuzzy, black background. Green digital words and numbers pop up on the margins. Next to Sylvie’s head “98.6 degrees” flashes in red, and next to mine “96.6 degrees” flashes. The words “REPTILE” blinks across the screen. Marie gasps.

We watch her roll her hips and drop into warrior three. She bounces her torso to get a good stretch.

“Things have been better since I started going to that studio in Connecticut,” Marie says. Her torso falls and she hangs in a standing forward bend. “The teachers there are wonderful. I want to take the postures home with me, it’s really special. And of course, now that the season is changing I’ll be coming here more often. It’s just hard for me when the temperature is too hot. Anything over seventy-four degrees.”

She stands up straight. “I’ll see you on Thursday, Sylvie.”

Marie walks out the door, detecting the temperature of the passing vehicles. To her delight, this charming fall day is exactly seventy-four degrees.

I watch training videos on a computer screen. Over a period of a couple of hours my face grows increasingly weary and my eyes begin to lull shut. The first video is a busty woman explaining different brands of yoga gear, the second is about how to clean the rental yoga mats with a squeegee. I yawn. In the next video, an angry man in a bathrobe is nailing a yoga mat to the door of a Catholic church and yelling something about hypocrisy.

“What do you know about enlightenment?” he cries. “What do you know?!”

I stretch my arms out and it doesn’t strike me as unusual that at some point in the transition into the dream sequence I changed into a lizard costume. Now I am a lizard in a cascading blonde wig. I leave the desk and join a yoga class that starts at 12:30. The teacher is playing a popular song by Enya and the lyrics to the song are a string of pasta dishes served at the Olive Garden.

“Brittany, do you have any medical conditions I should know about?” the teacher asks.

“I am a lizard,” I tell her dreamily.

“Do you know what kind of lizard?” she asks.

I roll out my mat. As the class begins, we all come to our hands and knees at the front of our mats, tilt our heads up, bulge our eyeballs towards the ceiling, stretch our tongues to the points of our chins, and let out a growl from the backs of our throats that releases all the awkwardness and embarrassments of the day.  

A Commercial for Science Diet Cat Food

I took my first walk through the new neighborhood today with my friend Christine. It was warm and breezy and adventure was calling. About two houses, away a boy with a voluminous, red fro tousled the fur of some sort of animal. Upon closer inspection, that animal was a cat.

“Hey kitty,” I called out in a high-pitched voice to the cat, who was more interesting to me than the person.

“My friend is going to get her some food,” the boy announced. I took a few steps back and stopped in front of the boy and the purring black cat. “Is that your cat?”

“This is a stray. We found him right here,” he said.

I was stricken with jealousy. However intense the cat lady vibes I emit may be, I have never been approached by a stray on the street, nor has a skinny tom ever appeared on my doorstep. This boy was living my dream.

“Why don’t you love me?” I thought, hoping the cat could telepathically hear my thoughts. The cat was receiving an intoxicating belly rub and did not concern himself with my dreams.

Soon another young boy sprinted down the street with no food to give the cat.

“If you need some cat food, I have some in my apartment,” I said.

“You have cat food at your house? Do you have a cat?” the fellow with the fro asked.

“No!” the other boy said. “That’s why she has cat food!”

“I’ll go back and grab a couple of cans,” I said.

Christine and I returned to my apartment, where I stuffed my purse with a few cans of Science Diet and a Ziploc full of cat treats. We walked back to the yard two houses over. The boy was still tending to the cat, which had retreated under a thorny bush.

“Did you bring food?” the boy asked. “The cat is hiding now, but I think I could put a can in there.”

The boy with the fro opened up the can of turkey giblets and slid it under the bush. The cat devoured the gravy with relish.

“I think that cat belongs to the lady across the street,” the boy’s friend said. He had picked up his bike and rolled it back and forth on the pavement.

“That cat is awfully friendly for a stray,” I said. “He might be right. You should ask your neighbors if they’re missing a cat.”

Just then, a woman in purple sweatpants came outside. I assumed that she was the boy’s mother.

“What are you guys doing?” she asked.

“He found a stray cat,” I said.

“That’s not a stray. That’s my cat, Jake.”

And there was the switch. What kind of game were they playing?

“I can see why you might think Jake is a stray,” the woman continued. “He never eats and he’s so skinny. Did you feed my cat?”

“She brought us some cans of food,” the boy said.

“Well, that’s nice of you. Jake never eats anything, but he seems to like whatever you gave him.”

“It’s Science Diet turkey giblets,” I said. I was blushing now and Christine and I started to back away from the stranger’s yard. The boy with the fro and his friend both ran off to their own houses.

“He’s only eating the gravy. Jake loves gravy. He doesn’t usually like cat food.”

“Well, now at least you know that he likes Science Diet,” I said, laughing nervously.

A man in a suit emerged from the house and headed towards the car with his briefcase.

“Look, Paul, some kids fed our cat. They went out to the store and bought him canned food,” said the woman.

“I didn’t buy them,” I said, backing towards the sidewalk. “I have a cat. That’s her food.”

A teenage boy came out of the house.

“Look, Sam, this girl was feeding our cat.”

“Well, bye,” I said, starting down the street with Christine. The two boys rode by on their bicycles.

“You can come over and feed our cat whenever you like,” the woman called out.

This is a strange place.

Phantom Limb

My story "Phantom Limb" recently appeared in issue 2 of The Golden Triangle. You can read it (as well as lots of other scrumptious literary morsels) by clicking the poorly drawn hand below.

Let's Learn Spanish

I want to live in the world of virtual language learning software – a Garden of Eden full of Spanish-speaking families, running horses, and women eating rice. Some of them live in apartments; some of them live in houses. Some of them live near the street and some of them live far from the street. They are all happy, regardless. They play a lot of soccer with children and go bowling with their families. There is no friendlier sub-species of Homo sapiens than the people who populate the world of language learning software. A man can simply walk up to another man who is sitting on the hood of his Cadillac and say, “Hola. You are a man.”

Thirsty people of all ages, races, and nationalities sit around the dining room table together, thoroughly enjoying tall glasses of milk. They relish in each other’s company so much that they laugh in every frame. And let’s not forget the rice. People in language learning software love rice. Nothing gets their horses running quite like it. Bowls of white rice consumed with dexterously maneuvered wooden chopsticks are the social lubricant of their utopia.

If you ran into a man and woman sitting on logs at a camp in the woods – a common occurrence in the world of language learning software – you would casually join them upon that log. They would introduce themselves and tell you they are from Italy. They would give you water. They would give you a bowl of rice. They would take you back to civilization on horseback and many old men on the street would stop and pet that horse and say with great satisfaction, “This is a horse. I am a man” The couple from the woods would introduce you to everyone they know. “This is my mother. This is my sister. This is a police man. This is a Russian. This is a baby.”

You would struggle to figure out what ending you’re supposed to use to address someone new when you say, “Enchanted to meet you.” You would regret leaving your Rosetta Stone lessons to gather cobwebs for five months and mix up the verbs for eating and running. You gloomily recognize that you still can’t make that double-L sound as impeccably as the charming Spanish man who does the voice-over.

But you know it doesn’t matter. At the end of the day, you know all of the Spanish you need to thrive in the world of virtual language learning software. The man, the woman, the Russian, and the grandmother will still be smiling when you use the wrong verb tense. If they are aware that you’ve made a mistake at all, they don’t have the words to express it anyways. The world of language learning software is a far simpler one than ours.

Like a Cat in Heat

Yesterday the vet removed Olive’s reproductive organs. It was for the best. If the vet hadn’t done it, I surely would have done it myself. Dave and I left her in the animal hospital overnight and sensed her absence when there was suddenly no cat to play fetch with or to urge us to produce Feline Greenies from the top bookshelf with persuasive high-pitched mews. I felt listless at home, stuffing my mouth with kalamata olives and marveling at the significance of my subconscious choice of soul food. Olive.

If only there had been another way!

The night before Valentine’s Day I sleepily spooned my cat for hours, waiting to be magically instilled with the desire to write about IV technicians. It never happened. Shortly after Olive pried herself away from the spoon-fest, she began mewing and crouching low to the floor, pattering around like an alligator with a toothache. I panicked, determining that she had some sort of bladder infection or feline meningitis and wondering what kind of animal hospital was open at eleven at night.

Ever the voice of reason, Dave insisted that the body language was speaking loud and clear: Take me. Olive started rolling sensuously with a come-hither glint in her eye. Perhaps Dave is right, thought I. My cat is just trying to seduce me. My concern melted into amusement, because there is something inherently funny about a horny cat.

Dave suggested that the dashing asthmatic tom with whom she had spent the weekend carousing might have released this hormonal kraken. I supposed that a pleasant treat-filled encounter with my friend Abbey had triggered her kitty-puberty. The vet informed us that it was, in fact, the spring-like weather transmitting high-frequency make-a-kitten waves to Olive’s pituitary gland.

Yes, those are the exact words that he used. I imagine it was the same exact weather triggers that caused everyone in my town to get pregnant at the same time. Pregnant with kittens, no less.

Once the hilarity of Olive’s hormonal surge wore off, it became rather annoying. Olive was deeply worried that her demand for tomcat penetration was not blatant enough with mere bottom-lifting and sumptuous rolling. She chose the kitchen table as the stage for her cat-calling because there are so many fertile male cats on our kitchen table. Olive made a point to rub her horny cat face against the bananas and the tea cups and the salt shaker.

I removed her from the table once every fifteen seconds. It took much vigorous scrubbing to remove the cat pheromones from the bananas. This all happened while I was still trying to write about IV technicians, to no avail. Frustrated and unproductive, I wished that Olive would repress her sexuality for even just one hour.

During lunch the next day I placed a freshly assembled salad of baby romaine lettuce on the table and left it alone for a few seconds. As soon as I turned around she was on the table, caressing the lettuce with her face – sensuously. I removed the top layer of lust-lettuce before eating it.

Olive tried to push a glass off of the counter with tender caresses from her face. She reasoned that if she broke something, I would get fed up and inseminate her. She planted herself on the stovetop, confident that I would get distracted from my pot of soup and fill her with one thousand kittens. I discovered a great trick to make Olive forget that she wants to make babies with me: When Olive starts putting on the moves, I throw her a jingly ball or a hair-tie. Her other strong feline instincts take the helm and guide her in the direction of that compelling ringing noise.

The third day we felt certain that she was no longer in heat. Dave left for work with little unwanted attention from a certain lust-filled feline. Shortly after, Olive was presenting herself on the desk before me. During the subsequent days, she waited until Dave left for work to commence sexy-time. It seemed that Olive had narrowed her list of potential mates down to me and for some reason I didn’t feel very flattered. Fix the cat, fix the problem, I grumbled at the blank page titled “IV Technicians.” Dave called the vet to plan a hasty hysterectomy and we had to wait a week to wedge her in the horny cat queue.

Now Olive is back at home, lounging luxuriously on her blue pillow and licking her sutured wound, slathering it in naturally occurring painkillers from the feline opiate-gland. We have to swab her belly with hydrogen peroxide twice a day to keep the surgical area as sterile as she is. The wound on her freshly-shaven Franken-belly is gruesome, to say the least. It looks like a preteen attempted to turn her abdomen into a stylish drawstring pouch and used a contrasting color of thread just to be a rebel.

Olive stiffly saunters around the apartment, mostly avoiding high places that used to fill her with lust, like the stovetop and the kitchen table. She looks skinnier now, short one sizable organ. Sometimes I wonder if she feels its absence, or if she only knows that she has a mysterious, throbbing belly-wound. Perhaps she even suffers from phantom uterus and feels imagined phantom kittens growing within it. I like to think that she forgot she ever had a uterus in the first place.

You know what? I love my sterile cat.

PANK Magazine

Here's some more shameless self-promotion for your enjoyment: My short story "Babymaking" was published in the February 2012 issue of PANK Magazine. Click the large-bellied ladies on the stick trampoline to read it and possibly even listen to it, if you feel so inclined.

Click here to get really pregnant.

The Golden Triangle

My short story "Magic Tricks" was published in the first issue of The Golden Triangle today. Click the poorly-drawn stick figure below to be instantly transported to my story on the Golden Triangle website via magic.

You should also take a look at the other lovely stories and poetry and admire the decadent layout. All of the etchings of gods, swans, and full-breasted mermaids in the background have exponentially inflated my sense of self-importance.

A Hole in my Ceiling Where Drills Escape

"Groovy pad," said the construction worker.

I thought the loud roaring above me was merely the construction that has been going on upstairs for the past several days. It turned out it was a drill coming through my ceiling.

The landlady and construction workers paraded down to our apartment door. They suspected that they had drilled a hole through the ceiling. I led the crew inside. We meandered around the coffee table and the bookcase to the bed, which had a little pile of paint chips and plaster.

“See that?” said the handyman, pointing upwards. “That’s a drill coming through your ceiling.”

The landlady jokingly said that she hoped we wouldn’t notice, but we probably would have noticed a threatening, protruding spiral of silvery metal gleaming above our heads as we slept.

They decided that the best thing to do would be to fix it right away, in case dust and liquids leaked out of the hole as we slept below. I agreed. Before I knew it, the crew was stripping away the comforter and pillows, carrying my mattress into the kitchen, and pushing the bedframe against the wall. They draped a plastic sheet over the bookcase and taped it into place.

“Groovy pad,” said one worker, looking from the psychedelic rug to my tie-dye rainbow leggings. I was walking around dressed comfortably because I had anticipated a long day of kitten cuddling and quietly copywriting. It was not meant to be.

Olive, our kitten, encroached upon the scene curiously as people came in and out to survey the damage. Then the drilling began and she dove behind the mattress. This happened several times. Once the drilling stopped for good, she ventured quietly into the construction zone and pattered through the plaster dust. A worker found a pile of her dust-coated toys that were under the bed and tried to throw them to her.

I scooped my brave little kitten up from behind the construction worker’s back and eventually barricaded us in the kitchen with a drawer unit and a tiny ottoman. Olive is not thrilled about our current living arrangements. As far as she is concerned, all of the things worth playing with are part of the construction zone. When she gets bored with her feather toy she tentatively bites my foot an act of revenge.

Not so long before the drill broke through the ceiling I was sleeping off a terrible headache and Olive kneaded my shirt to wake me up. If Olive hadn’t roused me with her cuteness, I might have awoken to a silver drill bit spirally relentlessly above my head, spitting a snow of plaster and paint chips. PTSD and nightmares reminiscent of the better Saw films would have likely followed.

The construction worker that is here now says that he will be another twenty minutes, and then the rest of the crew will return to patch the hole. The patching process will continue for another forty-five minutes. Perhaps I should follow Olive’s example and take a nap on a kitchen chair. It’s going to be a long afternoon.

Kitten Sunday

Yesterday was Kitten Sunday, the day that Dave and I designated specifically for adopting a kitten. Our apartment is full, but there is a kitten-shaped void. We picked up two friends and went to a local animal shelter to enjoy some feline company and find our match.

I got the feeling that the volunteers really didn’t want to give us a kitten. We told the receptionist that we wanted to adopt and she tried to talk us out of it.

“Are you sure? What if your landlord doesn’t want you to have pets? What if you break up? Are you just going to bring the cat back here?”

But we are no cat novices and already took these things into consideration. She reluctantly slid a clipboard with a questionnaire reminiscent of match.com, but for cats.  Then she directed us to the cat rooms. In the first room, we played with black kittens and temperamental tiger cats. I was quickly horded by adult cats demanding my attention. The volunteers in the room paid us no mind, ticking the kittens with Salad Fingers gloves.

The second room contained several adult cats that didn’t get along. A white cat got comfortable between my feet and tailless black cat nuzzled my leg, and they proceeded to fight. The other cats wanted looked on with indifference.

The third room contained the cats in cages, pacing and roughhousing and slipping their paws through the bars of the cage. Some of them came to greet us and others didn’t give us the time of day. The volunteer in the third room told us that we could play with individual cats that we liked in another room.

We went into the visiting room and waited for the first kitten that we wanted to get to know better – a fluffy, gray boy-kitten. The volunteer released the kitten onto a chair and quickly shut the door behind her, leaving the kitten in a new environment with four enormous strangers.

The kitten all but wet itself. It leapt off of the chair and darted to the safety of a carpeted cat-cave. The kitten was not amused my attempts to lure it from its hideout with a furry tail on a stick, seductively spiraling just within its reach. Nor was it thrilled when one of our friends attempted to scoop him up. When I tried to pet him, he slinked to the door with a panicked expression.

The prospect of adopting a kitten that was terrified of us was just too sad, even under reasonable circumstances, so we moved onto a gray girl-kitty with huge greenish-blue eyes. She seemed a little frightened when the door closed behind her, but soon she started brushing against my legs. We took turns dangling the furry tail on a stick in front of her and she played along. She found a chair cushion in the back of the room and maniacally kneaded it with her claws. When Dave picked her up, she purred and crawled onto his shoulders and ran down my back.

We were unanimously sold on kitten #2, but I wanted to give an affectionate adult kitty a chance, too. The volunteer brought us a third cat. It turns out he was seven months old but the approximate size of a Shetland pony. He seemed agitated out of his cage and allowed us to pet him for a while, but he mostly appeared annoyed and ready to return to the comfort of his cat cushion and the predictable bars. Before he left, he also maniacally kneaded the cushion. It’s his cushion now and nobody else’s.

After a thorough hand washing, followed by some absentminded kitten petting and some more thorough hand washing, we returned to the front desk. We told the receptionist the kitten we wanted.

“We need to see a copy of your lease before we can give you this cat,” she said.

I wish we had known about this before we spent hours playing with them. So we drove home, grabbed the lease, begged our landlord for a letter of recommendation, and quickly returned. The receptionist and other women who worked there looked it over carefully. They discussed the adoption in doubtful whispers. Then one of them went to the third room.

When she returned, she said, “You’re going to have to choose a different cat.”

In saying this, she ripped my heart from my chest, trailing behind it other important “feeling organs.”

“This cat hasn’t been spayed," she continued.

Well, yes, she was only a baby and cats can’t be spayed until they are six months old and fertile. I don’t know what to make of it. I hoped that we could work out a deal, or put her on layaway, or arrange a betrothal between us and our kitten that would go into effect on her six-month birthday. Fortunately, Dave was able to reason with the receptionist and we needed to provide the information for a veterinarian that has Dave on file. Hopefully that really is all we need to bring this time, and not our birth certificates and records of our whooping cough vaccinations.

The vet was not open on Kitten Sunday, so we must wait. Perhaps today is our day.

UPDATE: The next day we went to the shelter again and they gave us cardboard carrier full of kitten. "Is this for real?" we wondered. The sound of screaming kitten confirmed it. Olive is all ours, our squeaking and crotch-nuzzling bundle of joy.

After Thanksgiving...

Apartments

Last week, Dave and I viewed two apartments.

The first apartment was a stucco building in view of a cemetery. There was a stone owl on the roof, which Dave explained was meant to scare away real flesh-and-feather owls and evil spirits.

We were greeted by an older man with a Magic School Bus T-shirt. Until that moment I had forgotten that Magic School Bus and Miss Frizzle existed. Do you suppose she’s married now? I should have asked the landlord, since he seemed to be a diehard Frizzle Fan.

We passed a tiny front yard full of Fisher-Price toys (probably belonging to the landlord) and followed the landlord into the building. The first sound I heard was the wail of a crying infant.

“Already?” I sighed.

After three flights of stairs, we reached the Lucite crystal door handle of our apartment. Inside, the dark hardwood floors were newly installed and recently waxed. The powdery walls were freshly whitewashed and blinding. Every surface was fuming. I looked to the windowsill, where a bottle of Orange Glo, Windex, Lysol, and a box of Raid conspired. I slowly quickly became unpleasantly intoxicated by household chemicals. The window panes beyond the sill displayed the somber view of a cemetery.

The landlord began to glide his Swiffer mop around the parameters of the living area.

“I just discovered Swiffer mops,” he explained. “They’re amazing.”

We opened the bedroom closet, which had been nonsensically whitewashed from top to bottom. I began to suspect that a heinous crime was being covered up in this apartment.

“What do you think?” Dave asked.

“I can’t think,” I responded as 1,966,254 of my brain cells fizzled to a combustible pulp in a single second. Dave informed me that my face was turning unusually red.

“Do you have any questions?” asked the landlord from the other room, swiffing his Swiffer.

“Can I paint it?” I asked.

“That depends. I don’t want you painting the walls some obnoxious color, like black. Just give me a color and I’ll tell you if you can paint it.”

I suggested yellow as the most inoffensive color I could produce without a functioning cerebellum, and permission to paint was granted.

“Yellow,” he said thoughtfully. “I actually like yellow. That’s nice.”

The kitchen was green and yellow, with appliances that were older than my parents. I glanced at the stove, missing two spiral burners on the range.

“Does the stove work?” I asked.

He told us it did, and to prove it, he set his Swiffer against the counter and turned on the gas. I cringed, expecting the volatile apartment air to ignite. Luckily, it did not.

The landlord showed us the inside of the refrigerator, which seemed to have yellowed with age like a fine artisan cheese.

Dave and I thanked the landlord and took the forms for the apartment to the car. We drove around the area, admiring the parks, the ponds, and the proliferation of Dunkin Donuts establishments. There was a nice indie movie theater and a university, but otherwise the area was rather barren.

We talked ourselves into the apartment, which was pretty reasonable for our price range.

Just as we came to a conclusion, Dave’s phone rang and the landlady of a studio apartment invited us for a viewing.

Perhaps I was still loopy from the first tour, but the second apartment seemed great even though it was in the basement of somebody’s house. Perhaps it was the neutral aroma in the air, or the owner’s furniture filling the rooms, but I actually could imagine this apartment sustaining life. Little ceramic mushrooms decorated the fully-functional stove.

The couple that lived there had a closet full of board games and a hallway stacked with DVDs and CDs. Dave and the owner bonded over a board game. In the end, we were chosen to be the lucky tenants because of Dave’s good taste in obscure board games.

I imagined someone viewing the first apartment, chatting ecstatically with the landlord about the superiority of the Swiffer and discussing educational television. Somewhere out there is the ideal tenant for that place, too.

A Spoonful of Neutrons

I know a precocious young boy with an IQ of bazillion. One day he walked up to me at my retail job and said, "Let me guess: this is your holiday job. You graduated from college and you work here?"

I recently spent a long, intimidating ride home eating ice cream with this young fellow. As usual, he made me question the value of my college education as I stuttered out answers to his questions with my palms sweating profusely. After spewing out a mouthful of scientific trivia, he said, "It's amazing what you can learn on Yahoo, isn't it?"

At one point we argued fiercely about whether zombies would be considered human and attempted to draw parallels between cells and viruses. We discussed the probability of the apocalypse in 2012 and whether the local drive-in movie theater would bother tacking up a “Closed Forever” sign in the event of such a global catastrophe occurring at the end of the season.

He asked me many questions, some with familiar answers, others which merely baffled me.

Do you know how much a spoonful of neutrons would weigh on Earth?

Do you understand how the Mayan calendar works?

What has four legs in the morning, two in the afternoon, and three at night?

Do you know any “yo mama” jokes?

Did you know that a virus isn’t a living cell?

In fact, I did know that a virus isn’t a living cell, thank you very much. So that is one point for me against an elementary school child. You think you can beat me at this game? There must have been at least one biology class that I did not spend drawing cartoons of myself sleeping.

The really shameful thing is that I don't know any yo mama jokes off the top of my head. Not even one.

Cell Phone Pictures

My mother is having a difficult time with her new cell phone. The keyboard makes too much noise, texting quickly is complicated with the buttons in different places, and the icons have moved around only to spite her. She covets my antiquated phone of yore in all of its low-battery glory. She wants to trade her sparkling new phone for my elderly one.

Will lose all my pictures in the process of switching? Just in case, here are a few masterpieces worth preserving, save some snapshots of pointy men’s shoes and expensive upholstery fabrics. I’ll also spare you the site of me waking up from my wisdom teeth surgery, still high on laughing gas with gauze bulging from my tingling lips.

The Lunchables of the Jewish community, now available at your local Italian grocer. I will eat it in a box and I will eat it with a fox.

Inspiration for a fan fiction I would like to write.

This is the commemorative cookie cake of my senior year of college. It tasted like yellow dye and accomplishment.

Speaking of hairy dogs, Rene Magritte and I have the same taste. (Pomeranians are delicious.)

A frisky Native American in front of my grandfather's grave. Perhaps someday I, too, will be inhumed behind his enormous erection.

One day in the land of my ancestors (Whitehall) I found the grave of my great great great great great great great great grandfather, a general in the Revolutionary War, on a secluded hill. It was sort of obscured by a bush.

Perhaps my great great great great great great great great grandfather would look like this debonair actor from the Last of the Mohicans in casual attire.

This assesses the damage done to my bike after I ran over a bottle of Gatorade, fell onto the blacktop, and nearly got flattened by a car full of old people.

Golf outfits are just as silly now as they were one hundred years ago.