Walk the Cat

The world is mine oyster.

Walking cats on a leash is rather boring.

I don’t even know why I’m writing about it.

The hardest part is convincing the cat to wear a harness. It offends their deepest sensibilities. Olive feigns a struggle on principle, knowing secretly that the harness is her ticket to the mysteries of the unknown.

It’s adorable for the first five minutes or so, watching the cat behold the breathtaking world of grass, trees, and swarms of insects. Within seconds, there is a cloud of flies in orbit around my head like space debris. I want to go home.

When I walk Olive, the first thing she wants to do is ditch me. She tries to duck under a spiky bush or crawl into the spaces under the stairs. No amount of arguing will dissuade her from exploring tight crevices, so I pick her up and move her somewhere more human-friendly, hoping to disorient her enough that she forgets just how fascinating the spiky bush is.

Then Olive sees a majestic cardinal and she ducks down to watch it for the next ten minutes, chirping with predatory flicks of the tail. I wonder if the chirping is Olive’s interpretation of a mating call, in hopes of luring a desperate and confused bird into her open jaws. The bird is twitching its crest, fanning its tail feather – a come-hither in the universal language of love.

                                                                                              

Soon she finds something a hundred times more interesting than either bird or bush. It is a bit of sidewalk covered in a metropolis of ant hills for Olive to roll in. These are ants either of the red, bity persuasion or the refugee ants that gorged on our tahini last year, eventually conquered by Dave and some borax. Somehow they all live in quiet harmony in the cracks of the walkway. Olive collapses onto her back as though coerced by something stronger than her will. I lift her away from the anthills before the ants recognize Olive as a point of entry into our home.

Once Olive is begrudgingly within the apartment, freed from the leash that binds her, she is already craving more. What secrets lay entangled within the spiky bush? Will rolling in the ant hill fill the emptiness inside her? Now Olive will never know. Penny is nearby and before she knows what is happening I have the harness slipped over her head and fastened around her legs, secure as a straitjacket  I am very proud of this accomplishment. After six months with Penny, I have never managed to hoodwink her into a harness. Now she’s nice and snug and I lift her through the door.

For ten minutes, Penny stands just outside of the doorway. She is testing the waters. I don’t think Penny remembers grass and dirt. Then the spiky bush calls to her like a relentless siren. Come all ye cats, says the spiky bush. Alas, I cannot hear the bewitching music myself.

Penny weaves her way up the stairs to my landlord’s part of the house and gets tangled in the railing. With a tremendous tug, she shoots through the harness and leaves it dangling on the rails. Fortunately for me, she is too bewildered by nature to get far. I scoop her up and bring her indoors.

Once cats get a taste of taking walks outside, they can never go back. Olive is at the door now, trying to turn the doorknob with both paws, falling short of the strength and the appendages needed to actually do it.

Now that Penny has experienced the harness, I’m one step closer to training my cats to pull a chariot – the only reason I take them for walks at all.

Story Slam!

Reading in front of people makes me feel like I’m going to asphyxiate. It’s almost as bad as giving improvisational speeches. I hope I never have to be a best man. In spite of all this, I treasure a masochistic enjoyment of reading to crowds of highly critical strangers and all of the minor seizures that come with it. 

Over the weekend I did it for the first time in two years and it was thrilling, much like running away from an explosion in slightly tattered formal wear.

When the literary arts journal Gigantic Sequins advertised a story slam at the Stonewall Inn to benefit the Al Forney Center, I wanted to be part of it. Dave and I went into the city, got some excellent falafel, and joined in on the story slamming festivities.

The storytellers shared novel bits, creative essays, and short stories and I learned about Norwegian food and bikram yoga and New Jersey. In the tradition of American television, there were three judges who critiqued each piece and gave gratuitous fashion advise.

I wish I talked to more people rather than clinging to my table and my Dave – next time, perhaps, I will give myself a quota. (i.e., Today I will talk to five strangers no matter how sweaty it makes my palms.) I did get the chance to speak to Ian and Kimberly Ann from Gigantic Sequins and they were very kind and welcoming even though I was the only person in the room (save Dave) that they didn’t know.

When my turn came up, I read this story that I posted on my blog last year. (Dave, always incredibly supportive, let me read it to him a hundred times on the subway.) The spotlight blinded me from seeing any crowd in front of me at all, which was perhaps why I didn't begin the reading with my customary asthma attack. At the end, I was at the mercy of the three judges.

“I have to admit, I was skeptical when you came onstage. I mean, orange and sea foam? Not many people can pull that one off, and yet here you are, pulling it off – well, not really, but your writing redeems you,” said the judge with the mustache.

After the readings, I was picked to be one of the three finalists by the judges. As a finalist, I received two tickets to the Museum of Sex and an egg shaped sex toy that was very much made for a man. Our fates were left up to the audience, who applauded loudly to choose a finalist. It was a close call, but in the end, I won.

At this point I was too excited to act like a human. I was a blushy mess, unable to accept the prize gracefully. I kept kissing Dave on the cheeks, and when another reader tried to kiss me on the cheek I thought he was trying to whisper something in my ear. Note to everyone: Never try to kiss me on the cheek, there is no telling how I will interpret your body language.

Thus, I left the story slam with Museum of Sex tickets, a men’s sex toy, one hundred dollars, and a whole lot of love for Gigantic Sequins. (This is hardly surprising. A gerbil with an automatic hand gun is featured on the cover of the most recent issue.) I think every once in a while I have to do something that makes me feel uncomfortable.

Check out Ian's pictures from the event here.

You Live With Giants

Today my short story "You Live With Giants" appeared in the Maurice Sendak issue of The Golden Triangle. The whole issue is decked out with wild things, read it all and click the smudgy, hairy giant below to read specifically about giant culture.

Do not glorify the wars of giants; that violence is in the past.

The Lesson

“I’ve been learning to drive my whole life.” – Arcade Fire, “In the Back Seat”

I want to obtain a driver’s license before my five-hour class expires for a third time and, since I haven’t practiced the art of driving a vehicle in several months, I set out to find a superior driving instructor. All of the driving schools back home charged $90-120 a lesson, but here I can get a lesson for $50-60. And how many lessons can I possibly need? I’ve been practicing since I was seventeen years old and sometimes I can even parallel park.

I set an appointment at eight in the morning on a Wednesday to ensure that the lesson would not conflict with my work. At six in the morning I dragged myself out of bed, got ready for work, and went outside clad in an over-sized polo and nametag to meet my instructor.

Unless my instructor was a fourteen-year-old boy in a backpack, a middle-aged man with a lawnmower, or a sentient parked vehicle eager to impart its wisdom, there was no driving instructor to be seen. I checked the mail. I gazed into the eyes of the figure of a plastic owl in a nearby tree. I waited. No instructor.

I went back inside and tried to call the driving school to no avail. It seemed safe to assume that there would be no driving lesson and I was free to waste the next hour per usual. I checked my e-mail. I ate a bowl of delicious lentils. I read a passage of Lolita.

Suddenly the phone rang. I picked it up.

“Hi, Brittany? I’m outside of the country club but I can’t seem to find your house.”

It was the instructor. From this first sentence, I believed she might be more neurotic than I am. I wondered if she was like that all the time or only when losing a potential customer.

“I don’t think I live near a country club,” I explained. “I’m near a cluster of Chinese take-out restaurants.”

“Oh, I don’t know where that is. I looked your address up on MapQuest and I just can’t seem to find your house, but I’m really close.”

“You used MapQuest? Actually, I have to leave for work really soon. It’s been forty minutes and I assumed you weren’t coming…”

“No, I’m coming! I’m really close now,” she said.

“I work at nine-thirty…”

“Well, maybe we could go for a half hour?”

I considered.

“Would a shorter lesson cost less than an hour?”

“Oh, yeah, you only pay for how much time we drive. So we’ll just go for forty minutes and I’ll drop you off at wherever you work.”

“I think I’d rather just reschedule.”

“But I’m so close!”

And then the call dropped. Now I’m reconsidering whether I want to reschedule my lesson with this instructor. The last thing I need is another neurotic person in the car. And do I really want to take lessons from someone who talks on their cell phone while driving? Reflecting on this morning, I'm rather happy that I didn't spend the fifty dollars.

Tales from the Leaky Basement

I dreamed that I was in my kitchen and I found a crustacean with an elaborate shell tapping its fingers against the floor. I picked it up by the shell and entertained thoughts of eating it with a hot, buttery sauce and using its elaborate shell to listen to the ocean. Then I heard a sound like a fountain trickling water and wondered if the rest of the ocean was coming with the crab.

When I awoke, I was still in my apartment, cocooned in a duvet and clad in squirrel pajamas. I leaped out of bed in a frenzy, wondering if the source of the trickle was the leak over the window in the living room or the leak over the porthole in the kitchen. It seemed that I had not dreamed up the trickling after all. A cascade of water was streaming from the frame in between our kitchen and living room area, forming a little lake of water that was stretching its arms towards Dave's desktop computer.

I laid out a huge towel and made a run for the landlords upstairs. Olive made a dash for the door, too. She probably was attempting to swim for dry land. 

I burst through the door and cried, "Is your toilet overflowing again!?!"

This actually happened months ago and produced a rather surreal rain shower indoors.

The person who opened the door upstairs did not live there and didn't know the protocol for the leaky basement. She tried waking everyone else up to no avail and then called the handyman, who was an hour or so away.

I returned to the basement, assured that someone would be down to look at it in an hour. The leak had stopped spewing and the towel was soggy from end to end. Olive tried to dash outside again, ready to brave the floods. At this point, I think just about every segment of ceiling in our kitchen has erupted with a leak at some point. Surely this apartment is for the fishes.

Fit for a Fungus

Before I moved into the new apartment, I bought a rosemary bush that was shaped like a Christmas tree. I had every intention of stringing it up with lights and beads like a Christmas tree. Then December came around and I had a brown, spiky bush-skeleton shedding its needles on my windowsill. It wasn't as festive as I had hoped.

What went wrong?

My apartment is in a dusty basement. The last renters were eyeless mole-people. Prehistoric insects creep out of the cracks in the molding and the spaces where the pipes go through the ceiling, the wiggling ancestors of the centipede and mutant spiders that I catch in old ricotta cheese tubs and shake onto the driveway.

The windows are small, but at least there are windows. My landlords left wooden planks stacked in front of the kitchen windows to make me feel like I live in an 1850’s tenement, so very little natural light shines in. I have become a mole-person.

Yet I am not bereft of hope. Angelina, my pitcher plant, is thriving in the window beside this very desk, in full view of a creepy boarded-up garage. The little hairs that are springing up on her lips - her mustache, if you will - remind me of the tiny flesh-scraping hooks on a cat's tongue.

The day I moved in, I announced that I wanted to immediately procure a plant. Having a plant gives me the illusion that I am a responsible adult. “What could you possibly grow in here?” my mom asked.

“Mushrooms,” I declared.

I may have suggested mushrooms in jest, but now I’m completely serious. I stumbled upon this mushroom kit from Back to the Roots. This mushroom garden, which resembles a happy meal for gnomes, purportedly produces a sprawling mass of oyster mushrooms in ten days and produces at least two crops. The spore-filled soil inside of the happy meal box is made of recycled coffee grounds.

The process seems fool-proof, even for one prone to causing small forest fires in terrariums. You spray the coffee ground soil with the spritzer and mushrooms will grow. I may have found the ideal plant (or in this case, fungus) to grow in the dark.

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.

Villa Villekulla

I’m trying something new and scary called “organizing.” In spite of what I may state in cover letters, I have no talent for it. I firmly adhere to the aesthetic of rubbish. However, there is a fine line between a charming mess and an unsanitary pit of chaos, and the feng shui of my living space is careening towards the latter. Piles of books, piles of paper, piles of fabric, piles of receipt tape with notes scratched in the plastic coating – I cannot live a Zampano-esque lifestyle; it will not do. It's no wonder that I spend all of my time in the kitchen.

My bedroom contains six full shelves of books, and those that cannot squeeze onto these shelves are scattered in six piles in various places in my bedroom. These shelves are also a haven for kitschy fairy statuettes dismembered by the strikes of mischievous cat paws. It is the home of stuffed rodents, fortune cookie fortunes, and desiccated wisdom teeth in an envelope. There is a preserved rattlesnake head in a glass paperweight and a sizable collection of squirrel paraphernalia.

How do I go about organizing the books? I suppose I could organize them by color and put all of the green covered books on the north wall. I could alphabetize them by name. I could construct signs that will point me to the proper section of the alphabet.

←A-J

K-R→

S-Z↓

↑Oversized

I suppose I could sort them by genre. Perhaps I could squeeze all of the fiction into one bookcase. I can group the French language books and the Czech language books together with the travel guides somewhere between the hollow chocolate Satan and the Eiffel Tower figurine. I can put the mime technique books with the face paint. I can stack issues of the theology journal directly above the Vishnu paper lantern.

Or I can group all of the works by the same author together. My Oscar Wilde books should be set in front of the mirror so they can continually gaze at their own reflection. Books by Mark Dunn should be arranged so that the first letter of each title spells out a morsel of semantic vocabulary.  I could hide Mark Z. Danielewski’s books under a pile of newspapers inside of a trunk.

I will make a bookcase shaped like a three-tiered birthday cake for Leonora Carrington’s books and a UFO for Kurt Vonnegut's.My Edgar Allen Poe collection will naturally sit beside the bust of Pallas above my chamber door.  I will give Virginia Woolf a room of her own. Books by Samuel Beckett will be stuffed into a drawer full of bananas. And I could tuck the Amelia Gray books into a tangled nest of my own hair.

It won't be long before my bedroom becomes a superbly hygienic and navigable place once more.

Pins and Needles

While I should have been blogging or writing about pterodactyls, the urge to make something colorful and slightly idiotic became too strong to resist. It has been a long time since I last exercised the full range of my fine motor skills. I cracked open my sewing machine case and descended into lunacy for many lonely moons.

In a weekend of frenzied stitching I produced a new bag to replace the one I made last August for my European travels. The bag I brought to Prague tattered and ready for a comfortable retirement. The new one looks slightly Southwestern to me – perhaps it’s the button? Now that I’ve broken my one year pursing fast, I have an uncontrollable need to make clothing and curtains and cacti.

Continuing with the Southwestern theme, here is my cactus pincushion in all of its spiky glory. There is a breed of cactus called a pincushion cactus, so I've actually sewn up a lame visual pun and rendered it humorless with explanation.

The cactus is made of 100% XXL men’s tee shirt found in a free pile at college. I have many ridiculous pieces of used clothing that will probably become whimsical cacti in my idle hours. I just need a lot of tiny terra cotta pots to do it.

I also made a rather sad attempt at wire wrapping a vase. This is a technique I apparently have yet to master. The hook from which I intended to hang it is all barbed and mangled and I haven’t quite figured out how to fix it. Perhaps what it really needs is a tiny cotton cactus inside of it...

Carnivorous Plant: One Year Later

Last year I passed a lonely summer with nothing but the company of a molding, dormant pitcher plant that spontaneously combusted and withered at every turn.

I assumed it was dead, left it alone, flew to the Czech Republic, watched a whole bunch of puppet shows, became painfully familiar with the floor of Ruzyne Airport, authored a short story collection, tried out “green” blogging, discovered a sudden penchant for farming, completed my college education, and returned home only to discover that my plant had deceived me. It was not dead at all.

Is this some sort of joke, Pitcher Plant? After I purchased the distilled water that hydrated your discerning capillaries? After I took you out to photosynthesize on the porch almost daily? After I scrawled many a blog post detailing your progress and photographed your slowly unfurling leaf structures? Is this how you repay me, Pitcher Plant? Was this all part of your plan?

Did I suffocate you with my tenderness? Was it grief over the incineration of your terrarium mate that kept you wilted for so long? I resent you, Pitcher Plant. Someday I may find it in my heart to forgive you, but until then I will merely admit that you look really, really awesome.

Post-Graduate Goals

Learn to drive an automobile
Find tolerable job
Ascend to Gandhi-like lifestyle in order to pay off loans
Finish novel and screenplay
Write autobiography of John Smith
Become herbalist
Become fluent in French
Become sort of okay at speaking Czech, but with admirable pronunciation
Learn to play accordion
Learn to upholster sofas
Learn to design cubist furniture
Finally read everything by Samuel Beckett and Jean Genet
Read something relatively complicated in French
Become talented vegetable gardener
Successfully cultivate carnivorous plant
Pickle something
Become successful Indian Food chef
Make new purse
Learn to alter hideous clothing into aesthetically pleasing clothing
Become temporary hermit
Go to grad school for Something
Travel to Quebec
Revisit Czech Republic
Go on adventures in Finland, Belgium, Poland, Romania, and any country once part of the former Yugoslavia

Occupational Fantasy, Part Three

I am employed as an adjunct literature professor at a community college that specializes in the culinary arts. The administration provides me with an office in a former men’s restroom and I move all of my material possessions into the office, including a twin bed. I teach introductory classes with vague titles and the few students who take literature classes to become rounded and critically thinking chefs frequently spend the lectures compulsively sautéing mushrooms or garnishing salmon. The administration considers liquidating the School of Humanities to fund the lucrative new hibachi track, but instead requests new classes with a culinary angle, such as Food for Thought. I am pressured into lecturing a seminar on food writing. For lack of a better plan, I bring in doggie bags from various dining establishments and assign articles on their contents. In my office the peace is occasionally disturbed by an aspiring hibachi chef looking for the men’s restroom, but in my free time I write stories and build cubist furniture.

Occupational Fantasy, Part Two

I am standing in a quiet, empty metro station when I feel a stranger’s hand on my shoulder. I turn and see a man in a long trench coat with wild snakes of hair and suppose that he is either homeless or a wizard. He says that he is a cubist furniture designer and that I will be his apprentice. He will teach me to upholster cubist furniture and restore antique cubist furniture to its former condition, and when he has taught me all that there is to know about cubist furniture I will be the greatest maker of cubist furniture in the world. I say okay. The metro appears and he pulls me inside with great haste. We go to his cubist furniture studio where I choose appropriately coordinating fabrics for each grain of wood. The cubist furniture master tells me that we will have to work quickly through the cubist furniture curriculum because of those who would have me fail. His rival cubist furniture designers have spies everywhere, behind the cubist wardrobe and under the cubist bed. In just a couple of weeks I learn the appropriate skills of a cubist furniture designer and open my own shop where my cubist chaise lounges are purchased by wealthy collectors from all over the world. After a long day of upholstering, I have time to write stories.

Kolej Komenskeho

To catch up on things that I want to write about that I haven’t gotten to write about yet, I’m going to take you for a ride in a textual time machine where my posts are in reverse chronological order. I’m onto my second illness now, so I have all the time in the world to backtrack.

I’ll begin with my dorm, because that is where I am at this very moment.

Kolej Komenskeho is a residence hall in Praha 6, a short walk away from Prague Castle and other marvelous things, like Tibetan food. Like Purchase, it appears to be under indefinite construction. I was told that the dormitory is a repurposed hospital, and I suspect that our bathroom is haunted by a kidney stone patient from the nineteen sixties.

Our hallway consists of suits with two dorm rooms and a common kitchen. The kitchen has a hotplate that I’m a little afraid to use and a small refrigerator.

I have two suitemates, but I have no roommate. Consequently, I began using the empty side of the room for storage. My suitemates stripped the bedding and all that is left is a sheet, which I have covered in pamphlets because I have no idea what to do with all of them. The empty bed seemed as good as any other place. The desk has a stack of unused towels, a bar of soap, and some Jehovah Witness literature that I’ve been meaning to dispose of.

Until today my side of the room was even more of a disaster. I’d kick off my shoes into the middle of the room rather than returning them to the wardrobe. My desk became covered in used tissues and chocolate wrappers. I had unwashed dishes caked with yogurt strewn about. I have a friend who also has a double room to himself, and he warned me that a Czech student would probably move in soon. I planned to clean the room this weekend, before classes start.

After class today, I saw that there was a crowd standing in the lobby, looking very similar to my ECES group when we were first moving in. I quite nearly had a heart attack. I imagined my roommate, unlocking the door just minutes before, discovering that all she has for bedding is a blanket of brochures and a used towel. She cringes looking at my crusty dishes and my piles of clothes. As she goes to set her bag down she stumbles over a renegade sandal and imagines what a monstrous roommate cruel fate must have dealt her. Just then, my roommate would glance over at the pamphlets on the desk in horror and think, “She going to try to convert me!”

 

Perhaps I had a roommate after all, and she already came and left. I supposed she promptly marched to the lobby and demanded a single room.

Just in case I’m assigned another roommate, I have cleaned off the bed and desk and tidied my own side up as well. Part of me hopes that I do scare away any potential roommates. I know it would be a good experience to live with a Czech student and have ample chances to mluvim cesky, but I do so love living alone.

 

There were a few things that shocked me when I first moved in. First of all, the bathroom. I was alarmed to find that there was merely a sink and a shower and immediately thought it might be some error in the dorm’s construction. For a moment I considered going to the repairs book and recording paint chips and a lack of toilet. I discovered that there was a separate room for the toilet behind the door to the suite. The second stage of shock came when I realized that it was clearly a Victorian toilet, the likes of which I have only seen in museums. One flushes it by pulling a long string, much like one raises one’s Venetian blinds.

I should add that the Czechs have a passion for trying to reinvent the toilet. I have seen toilets that you flush by pulling a knob and toilets that you flush by pushing a button. They no longer surprise me. Also, Czech toilet paper is the equivalent of our brown paper towels.

Another thing that shocked me was the lack drawers. Whereas in Purchase we would have a dresser and a closet or wardrobe, at Komenskeho we have a wardrobe and a lot of shelving. I have all of my clothes neatly folded on the shelves, and I keep my socks and underwear in my desk drawers with my writing utensils.

My favorite part of my room, besides the fact that I’m the only one in it, is the windowsill. It stretches from one end of the room to the other. I climb up on it and read in the window by sunlight. It makes me feel like a literate feline, basking in the sunlight and enjoying contemporary Czech fiction.

Baumwolle

(Note: I wrote this last night and fell asleep in the process. I thought I would finish it up and post it anyways, since I have nothing better to do.)

I’ve been a sick little girl. The last meal I ate was yesterday afternoon on my trip to Kutna Hora: a slice of pizza and a crepe. Then I came home and my stomach began its mutiny. I spent my first full day without an itinerary napping my sour stomach away and feasting on the occasional roll. My one excursion, to acquire rolls and multivitamin juice, concluded when I was pounced upon by a Jehovah’s Witness with a briefcase full of Good News who immediately sensed that I was a New Yorker. I need to stop wearing running shoes about town.

Since I am stuck inside, with no wish to be converted and too weak to venture beyond the streets that surround my dorm, I have decided to do laundry. I had no idea what I was getting myself into.

I got the key from our building’s concierge. She had to help me find the door because our laundry room’s hallway had no lighting. She also needed to unlock the door when I could not feel where to put the key. Inside I was delighted to discover that the buttons were all in Czech and I could not figure out immediately which machines were washers and which ones were dryers.

I flipped helplessly and deliriously through the booklet of directions. All of the English was poor, the symbols were indecipherable. The automatic setting was called Baumwolle, and that was on the machine with the English subtitles.

The concierge came in, sensing my distress. She helped me choose a temperature in Celsius and a type of fabric. She asked what setting I prefered, explaining, “Baumwolle is natural fabric, it is too hot for synthetic fabric.”

“What does baumwolle mean?”

“It is English. It is… baumwoole,” she explained. She pointed to the corresponding word on the machine without Czech subtitles. It was a word that looked like baumwolle, but Czech. I pushed the mysterious button and hoped for the best.

When I opened the detergent compartment, someone had left a speckled pile of detergent behind. The concierge explained that it was called “baumwolle.” Actually, she brought a teaspoon and scooped it into the other side of the compartment for me. After that, the machine worked perfectly for me, but I was still uncertain how to use it without aid. I suppose I’m going to need to fetch the concierge for every load of laundry for the next three months.

I looked up “baumwolle” on Google when I got back to my dorm room. It means cotton, but in German.

For those who would inquire about my health.

Every muscle in my body has ached for days on end in inconvenient spurts. My hands are prematurely arthritic. My legs cannot support my frame for another minute. The pressure in my temples is unbearable. My nose has been running. First the right nostril, then the left nostril, then the right again. I, with my tissue, can never keep up. My ears have a curious itching sensation. I can barely hear over the incessant rumbling. The swelling of the throat is the worst. Breathing is difficult; swallowing, impossible. My voice is a mere whisper. My lips are cracked and peeling. The cramps in my stomach cripple me to the floor several times an hour. Insomnia, pain, and the stench of my cat’s gas have kept my eyes open through the wee hours of the morning. The doctor prescribed me Tylenol and a nasal rinse, but nothing helps. Otherwise, I can’t complain.