Unfortunate Stuffed Animals

Disconnected

A portrait of my cell phone: Elderly at the ripe old age of five. Scratched burgundy shell, the cover long since peeled off. Old but reliable. Not quite old enough to have an antenna, but not quite recent enough to know what an “app” is. It flips open, revealing a screen black and blank. In its disabled state, caused by concrete-inflicted injuries, it no longer remembers how to add a contact. It can recall neither the calculator it once new so well nor the alarm clock. Text messages are a laborious task when you can’t flip a flip phone. I press the number “3” three times for an “I.” When agitated, it takes blurry pictures of the inside pocket of my purse. The phone powers down, exhausted, before I even get to work.

You might call it cruel of me to keep its nose to the grindstone when I should be pushing it to sea in a viking boat and singing sorrowful hymns, yet after several weeks I still haven’t replaced it. I can’t open at a text message longer than five words because the outer screen is too small. I can’t look at a picture. I can’t set an alarm. Dave is my begrudging alarm clock now and I have done nothing. I am in denial. I am waiting for the problem to fix itself.

Nothing annoys me more than technology with a lifespan shorter than that of a hamster. Electronics die and are replaced with a newer, shinier inventions faster than I am willing to keep up with. When I latch on to a cell phone or an iPod, my attachment outlasts battery life expectancy. My phone was a constant in my life throughout college. When I graduated, my phone was there. When I moved downstate, my phone was there. It even lay dormant in my suitcase for four months while I frolicked through Prague.

Dave gave me his old Android phone, a hand-me-down upgrade from the old flip phone. I thought of the advantages of catching up with current technology. Emailing on the bus. Googling engrossing questions. Immersing myself in an emerging genre of literature only accessible with a smart phone. I spent hours on the phone with Verizon trying to set it up, only to find out that I would have to pay a data plan. This I was not willing to do. So I trudged onward, stubbornly clasping a powered-down flip phone that reeks of death and dementia.

When I get a new cell phone or a computer, I want it to meet my parents. I want it to grow old with me. If I get a replacement phone (and that cell phone will likely be an identical flip phone), it better be ready for a commitment. I'm in it for life.

I am at risk for everything

To sign up for my new health insurance I needed to take a multiple choice-style health evaluation through WebMD. It asked me questions about my diet, exercise regimen, repetitive tasks at work, how much time I spent sitting, and how much time I spent standing. It asked me if I had moved in the past year and if I had changed jobs.

I groaned my way through the diet segment, recording the number of servings I eat from each segment of the food pyramid, knowing full well that not eating meat or very much dairy for that matter would significantly bring down my score. Somewhere, a stern-looking insurance elf would be marking points against me in his policy holder records.

Since when is WebMD a trusted source of health-related information, thought I, and who would find such an exam useful? Surely it would deduce from the thirty or so multiple choice questions that I’m at risk for cholera, trench foot, and tapeworm, and proceed to recommend me a cure in the form of lean meats.

My actual test results were not so far off. The level of health risk was displayed, to convey a high level of urgency, with a red bar graph that nearly reached the highest level (representing death, I presume?). Were this evaluation a strongman game at the local county fair, I would have been mere inches away from ringing the bell and winning an enormous stuffed lobster for my bombshell girlfriend. Beneath this graph I was declared to be at high risk for a musculoskeletal condition.

My level of stress was also in the red. I didn’t expect stress to put me in the “massive coronary” range, but then I reviewed my answers and I remembered that I had moved twice and rolled through a series of five new jobs in one year. When I factor in student loan conundrums and chronic leaky ceilings and public transportation woes, it’s no wonder I can’t stop sleeping.

I don’t always recognize stress when it’s actually happening – sometimes it manifests itself as a cookie binge, other times a temporary coma. Recently I also had bouts of uncharacteristic crabbiness and blotchy, peely skin. It was like the skin cells on my face were trying to abandon ship.

WebMD proceeded to recommend a series of stress management techniques like meditation, yoga, and journaling. There was not one technique listed that I don’t already do. What can I do to alleviate stress that I’m not already doing? I asked myself. I certainly can’t stop the ceilings from leaking and stop the job markets from sucking and stop people from being absurd.

Then I reminded myself that this was a very general evaluation from the same website that had lead me to believe on more than one occasion that I had bone cancer and that skin condition that made Michael Jackson white. I was probably, for the most part, fine. I certainly couldn't give the insurance elves the satisfaction of divining my stress-related death. I, for one, intend to live. With leaky ceilings and all the rest of it. Forever, if necessary.

Probable Causes of a Crooked Spine

I took advantage of a free medical screening through my job and ended up in a crowded waiting room with some very sick people. An elderly woman in the chair next to me was pushing a walker back and forth across the waiting room floor.

“They told me I had to stop eating meat to save my life while I was in the hospital, so I stopped eating meat. Any time they bring me food, I just eat everything but the meat,” she said. “I lost sixty-five pounds.”

The slouching men behind her laughed, swinging their heads back, crippled by the hilarity.

Another woman stepped into the conversation. “Don’t laugh, she was trying to save her life. Meat is bad for you. Pork isn’t so bad, though.”

“I had open heart surgery and they told me if I didn’t stop eating meat, I’d die,” the woman with the walker said. “And if they told me to stop eating something else, I’d do it. I have diabetes. My feet swell up so much sometimes they turn red. And I have asthma. I went to the doctor one day because I couldn’t breathe. He said I have COPD.”

All the men in the waiting room seemed to have gimpy legs and dragging feet. One woman was trying to get an appointment for her baby, but the baby was too young to see a general physician.

After filling out some paperwork, it was my turn to see the doctor, a chiropractor. I have scoliosis, sporatic sciatica. I used to be a gymnast; I thought my spine was made of rubber. I wanted to be a Chinese acrobat but I wasn’t even remotely Asian. I carried a bulging backpack that was a third the weight of my late bloomer body throughout middle school. All the standing at work hurts my shoulders and neck and these seem like probable reasons for a crooked spine. If being healthy were a competition, the baby in the waiting room probably would probably win but in spite of everything I was in an admirable second place.

I told these things to the chiropractor and he wanted to see my back for himself. I stood in socks and a dress in the waiting room, touching my toes and standing at different angles. He showed me a picture of a human spine from the side.

“See this curve below the neck? That’s supposed to be there for shock absorption. You don’t have a curve, your spine is perfectly straight.”

My back, with curves in all the wrong places.

“Could that be causing my neck pain? The lack of shock absorption, right?”

I need to know the cause and effect of things and connect the dots. This often annoys doctors.

“It’s very likely. And your hips are uneven. One is higher than the other.”

“Is this why I have scoliosis? My spine is adapting to fit my hips?”

“It’s very likely. Your spine will always adapt to keep your head upright. In extreme cases, you’ll see some people with “s” shaped curves in their back but their heads will always be upright.”

“Is there anything I can do about this? Yoga makes my back feel great, but I can’t do it very often. My cat claimed my yoga mat as her territory. If I try to do yoga in my apartment, she will actually attack my face.”

The chiropractor laughed. “You should video that, you could win a few thousand dollars on World’s Funniest Home Videos. I’d vote for a video of your cat attacking your face while you do yoga.”

“Then I could put the money towards a larger apartment and put a door in between me and my cat.”

In the lobby, I waited to find out information about my insurance from a pregnant receptionist with a striking baby voice. There was another woman next to me this time, the grandmother of the baby. The others in the waiting room declared her a female Chris Rock, to which she responded that she knew she was funny and she wrote things sometimes.

“I’m ready if I ever get into the White House. I’m sick of looking at the White House. It’s boring. You’ll know if I’m president because I’ll paint the White House green,” she said. “I liked to see the look on Romney’s face when he lost. He didn’t have anything to say, he only had an acceptance speech. He looked like he was crying. Now he has to go explain to his seventeen grandkids that they aren’t going to live in the White House. They be like, “What happened, Grandpa? I thought we was gonna move?”

The receptionist came back with my insurance information.

“Every time she speaks I think, ‘where’s the baby?’” the woman beside me said.

“It’s just her voice.”

“I just keep thinking, maybe that’s not her voice. Maybe it’s the baby inside talking.”

Tragedy Strikes the Weather Channel

The Benefits of an Alpaca Puppet

Candy Castle Keep

Lolly sits in the keep of Candy Castle with her candies-in-waiting. On the other side of the keep, Queen Frostine drinks chocolate milk from a long-stemmed glass. A stern-faced gingerbread man stands beside her with a jug of Moo Milk. She calls to Lolly.

QUEEN

Come here, my little crumpet. (To the gingerbread man) Pour another glass.

LOLLY

(She goes to the queen)Yes, my lady?

QUEEN

Sit down. Have a drink.

LOLLY

I’m… not thirsty.

QUEEN

If you were thirsty, I wouldn’t have offered you milk. Drink.

LOLLY

(Takes a glass from the gingerbread man) Thank you.

QUEEN

I would rather face one thousand armies then be trapped in Candy Castle with these trembling truffles.

LOLLY

But the candies-in-waiting are under your protection!

QUEEN

I’m just doing what is expected of me. I can’t just let them melt in the heat of the battle. You will have to live up to certain expectations, too, if you marry King Jellybean. (She guzzles the rest of the chocolate milk and hands the glass to the gingerbread man) If my little brother somehow manages to win the battle, the kingdom will sing songs of my inspiring bravery.

LOLLY

But what if Candy Castle falls?

QUEEN

You would like that, wouldn’t you? If anyone but Lord Starburst were attacking us, I would appeal to his natural cravings, so to speak. Are you shocked, my little crumpet? Here’s some advice: the best weapon is your creamy center. (To the gingerbread man) Pour Lady Lolly another drink. (To Lolly) If Candy Castle falls, we’re in for a bit of a rape. When those Wonderballs roll in from battle, even the stalest morsel looks sweet. Why, you’ll look just like a slice of cake. You can be sure that there will be a special prize hidden inside of each of these ladies by morning. Then you’ll be glad for your cordial cherry filling.

Lolly takes a glass of chocolate milk from the gingerbread man and gulps it down in one shot.

You can read the epic conclusion of the battle here.

Operation: Turtle

Today I took my first bike ride of the season. I discovered my bike hanging upside-down in the garage, so I hijacked my mom’s bike and pedaled into the humid highway haze before me. As I followed the road around a small lake near my house, I whizzed past what appeared to be a typical mass of mutilated road kill.

But, no! Upon closer inspection, it was not dead at all – the mass in the middle road was a turtle with no common sense. It parked itself in the line of fire, calmly waiting for the next log truck to flatten it out.

“Are you mad?” I asked the turtle, but it would not yield to reason. Unfortunately, reason was the only turtle-removing tool at my disposal. This was no ordinary turtle: this was a snapping turtle. I considered picking it up by the shell and whisking it to the other side of the road and determined that the risks of losing a finger or a portion of my face were too great. I abandoned my bike and stood awkwardly in the middle of the road, a safe distance from the immobile reptile.

Soon, a car approached. I indicated the suicidal turtle and the car slowed to a stop at the side of the road. A man and woman stepped out of the car. The woman had been a regular customer at the supermarket I used to work at, but she barely recognized me under the shadowy visor of my dorky bike helmet.

“No one on this road is going to slow down for a turtle,” she said.

The man dug an ice scraper out of the back of the car. He prodded the turtle and it leapt about a foot in the air with hits neck outstretched. The turtle curled his neck around like a little brontosaurus to take a vicious bite out of the ice scraper.

“Maybe we could find a large stick,” the woman said tentatively. After a quick scavenger hunt in the woods, the man and woman returned, each with a large prodding stick. The turtle resisted every attempt to prod it to safety. It kept trying to dodge the pokes, uncertain which stick to kill first. This snapping turtle might have been a ninja turtle.

“Maybe if you poke it a little harder it will leap across the road by itself,” I suggested.

“I’m going to get the shovel,” the woman said. She climbed into the car and drove away.

Meanwhile, I abandoned my bike and the man and I appointed ourselves as traffic guards at a wild animal crossing. We stood like traffic cones around the turtle. An SUV pulled up beside the tranquil turtle, which was content to meet its gory death. The window opened.

“Look, a turtle!” the driver said, lingering in the road. Then he sped away and another car pulled up from the other direction. It was the woman and her mighty, red snow shovel.

As she tried to scoop the protesting turtle into the deplorable groove of the shovel, another man arrived on foot. He deftly swept up the turtle and carried it, with its claws waving about frantically, to the lake.

“The snow shovel is good for this because you can just pick up the turtle and move it,” the woman said.

“The shovel is perfect for turtle transportation,” I agreed.

“That’s why we bought that shovel. You should keep one in your car,” she told her companion.

The second man lowered the shovel into the lake and set the turtle free. I’d like to say that it swam off into the glowing sunset, but the turtle didn't swim and it was still midday. It turned abruptly and looked like it was going to sprint for the open road.

“It looks like it wants to come back,” the woman observed.

“Check back in five days and if it’s back in the middle of the road, just bring back the shovel,” I suggested to the turtle removal experts.

Maybe the turtle didn't want to live after all. Perhaps it was suffering from a midlife crisis or severe existential angst and decided that death was the answer. Perhaps he had a superpower that was not so much a gift as a curse. We did all we could do, anyways.

With the turtle safe, I bid my goodbyes to people I will not likely see again and rolled away down a winding road sprinkled with the corpses of tiny orange moths.

You Can Count on Me

A snowy-haired father is dying in his bed, surrounded by three sons. There are cats walking on the headboard, on the dressers, on the carpet. The father coughs and waves over his eldest son.

ELDEST SON: What is it, father?

FATHER: I have something for you…

The father extends his closed hand and the oldest son puts his hand out tentatively.

ELDEST SON: What… is it?

FATHER: It’s a Petco savings card. Don’t lose it. The cats are your responsibility now…

The oldest son takes the savings card.

FATHER: Buy the Science Diet. It’s still on sale….

The father dies. The eldest son clutches the savings card to his heart with a dutiful expression.

ELDEST SON: I love you, Dad.

Fade to black. On the screen, the following appears:

Petco. It’s what your father would want.

Confessions of a Fire-Breathing Brontosaurus

I used to be obsessed with hot wings. I would order them at the highest level of spiciness offered in a restaurant, usually extra spicy with fire sauce, a side of death, and a stack of napkins to cry into. The waiters always raised their eyebrows and asked me if I knew how powerful extra hot really was, to which I would arrogantly respond, “I think I can handle it.” My personal chicken wing philosophy at the time: If it doesn’t make you cry, it’s not worth it.

In high school, one of those school magazines that recognize precocious young artists printed a poem I wrote, a passionate sonnet to the chicken wing called “Chicken’s Kiss.” My passion wasn't limited to tasty birds, however. I had an impressive assortment of hot sauces lined up in my refrigerator, like Dinosaur Duels the Devil hot sauce. The label depicted a fire-breathing brontosaurus sword fighting Satan. Sometimes I dribbled hot sauce on a bowl of ice cream because I liked to eat my pain for dessert.

In college, I stopped eating meat. Hot wings were removed from the dietary equation, but my cravings for foods that burn only multiplied. I couldn’t even take a whiff of the dining hall air on Wacky Wing Wednesday without my mouth watering. I flipped open a Thai food takeout menu searching for answers and discovered drunken noodles, a sort of string bean and bell pepper stir fry with a spicy sauce speckled with Thai chilies.

Every Thai restaurant menu has a spiciness scale of one to five chilies, with one chili representing mildly spicy (or American spicy, as Thai folks surely call it) and five chilies indicating Thai spicy. One might notice, scanning through a menu, that there are no more than two chilies in a row beside the titles of spicy dishes. Sure, two chilies on the scale of one to five (Mexican spicy?) is pretty hot, but it seemed important to experience the particular burn of five chilies for myself.

The Thai food restaurant in the area where I grew up used to employ a totally Thai staff. Smiling Thai women in traditional Thai garb used to pour our Thai tea and bring us complementary Thai soup. Then all of the Thai ladies were slowly replaced with white guys in button-up shirts. One day, while out to lunch with Dave, I asked one of the waiters if I could have the drunken noodles at the highest level of spiciness.

“Are you sure?” he asked wryly. “That’s really hot.” I assured him that I could handle it.

When my meal arrived, I ate half of the plate with my eyes streaming and lips burning. I must have downed five or six glasses of water. It was glorious.

“I hope you’re enjoying that,” Dave said, watching me sob into my napkin.

Homemade salsa became another source of spicy indulgence. My brother and I would stay up late chopping up tomatoes from the garden and variety boxes of hot pepper from the farmer’s market. The first time I cut a jalapeno, I ingeniously used my bare hands. The acid got under my fingernails, singed my skin, and sizzled into the wee hours of the morning.

Following advice from a forum I found from a Google search, I soaked my hands in straight-up white vinegar, scrubbed them with dish soap in the hottest water my hands could stand, and washed them in ketchup. In the end, I drifted into an uneasy sleep in bed with plastic baggies full of ketchup tied over my hands.

It’s funny to think that a jalapeno, barely spicy enough to tickle my taste buds, could cause so much agony on my skin and I can only imagine what hot peppers do to my internal organs. Why do I eat these things and why do I enjoy them? There certainly is a hint of masochism to adoring spicy food.

Last night, Dave refilled our jars of curry and red pepper flakes while I did the dishes. He peered into the enormous bag of red pepper flakes and took a sniff.

“Red pepper smells really weird,” he said. He brought the bag to me. “Smell this.”

Dave accidentally squeezed the bag and a red pepper flake popped into my eyeball. It felt like fire under my eyelid. Wailing, I ran to the bathroom and doused my eye with cold water to get the pepper flake out, but the burning sensation lingered. Once my eye cooled down enough for me to see, Dave consulted the internet, finding amusing anecdotes about people burning themselves with hot peppers and how to keep cats out of your garden with a barrier of red pepper flakes. The burning stopped before “how to get red pepper flakes out of my girlfriend’s eye” turned up with any useful answers.

Somehow, after all of this, I’m not in the least put off by hot peppers. I’m am no less interested in a plate of Thai food or a salsa that needs to be chased with twenty gallons of cold water. Recently, I read in a nutrition book that cold-blooded, reptilian monsters like me crave spicy food to warm our bodies and increase circulation to our extremities, which explains a lot. But it doesn't explain why I’m drawn to food that makes me cry.

You Mean Business

I'm judging you.

If you’re like me, you’re a neurotic woman who spends several days before a job interview anxiously clicking through dozens of contradicting videos on Youtube about how to dress for a job interview. Look no further, for I will summarize it all for you here.

BUY A SUIT

She's doing it all wrong. WHERE ARE THE PINSTRIPES?

First, you will need to buy an expensive, black, pinstriped suit. Pinstripes trigger psychological impulses in your brain that make you more ambitious. Get that suit professionally tailored by a seamstress because you mean business. The suit should have a skirt because you’re a woman, unless you’re a woman who would prefer to wear pants. A dress would be even more formal, and therefore better, because it shows that your dressing for the job you want.

Wear a plain white button-up shirt underneath the suit, because anything else might be considered a brazen display of personality. And save the cleavage for the club, skankmuffin! When the interviewer is yawning under a flickering desk lamp of despair at two in the morning deciding whether or not to employ you, you want her to imagine you as a blurry, floating head and not the girl who wore a pink shirt. Remember, this isn’t Legally Blonde. This is your dismal life.

DON'T LET THIS BE YOU!

And whatever you do, don’t show up in nicer clothes than the person who is interviewing you. If you find that your interviewer enters the room a frumpy expensive suit, quickly saw a run in your pantyhose with a Swiss army knife and deposit your accessories into a nearby potted plant before she imagines that you think you’re better than her. Turn that ambition down a notch, tiger!

WEAR BORING SHOES

You should wear high heels – but not the same ones you wear to the Jersey Shore, silly! They should be plain, professional, black heels. You should definitely wear panty hose under those heels, but keep in mind that this will only impress old people. If your interviewer is under the age of thirty-two, she will cross you off of her list as soon as she sees your panty hose and begin composing a saccharine rejection email while you explain why you’re leaving your current position. And while you are sobbing next to the silent phone a week later, your interviewer will be at that the office making fun you with the free-legger she hired instead. They will all judge you.

ACCESSORIZE

Wear accessories! Show your personality! Woo! But keep in mind that your accessories will be judged mercilessly. Stick to chunky bracelets. No one is ever offended by chunky bracelets.

I hate chunky bracelets. I stopped listening to you fifteen minutes ago.

HATS

No.

LEAVE THE PURSE AT HOME

Remember, a purse is just one more thing that an interviewer can make subjective judgments about. Do you think you should bring the big ol’ hobo bag with your entire life in it? An interviewer might assume that you’re a kleptomaniac who casually shoplifted a purse full of bat-wing tops from the Forever 21 on your way to the office. Do you think you should carry in a little clutch containing your keys and cell phone? The interviewer will probably assume that you wore it to a high school dance and couldn’t be bothered to procure a purse that is appropriate for a job interview. How will you know if your purse is job interview-approved? Condoleeza Rice will come to you in a dream and deliver you a plate of homemade fudge. If this has never happened to you, you do not have the right purse.

But how do you carry your keys without a purse? Swallow them and regurgitate them after the interview. You know, like a fugitive! You can have the festering stomach lesions stitched up once you have a job with healthcare benefits.

HOW TO CARRY YOUR RESUME

Some people think they need a large purse to carry their resume. Instead, carry your resume in a briefcase. But keep in mind that a briefcase is just one more thing that an interviewer can make subjective judgments about. You can carry the resume in your hand.

IT’S RAINING

If it’s raining, don’t go to the interview. Rain makes interviewers irritable, so they probably won’t hire you unless they decide that you’re even more dedicated for coming in during a downpour. No, you can’t wear galoshes. Still carry your resume in your hand because if you really want that job, then the force of your tremendous will and ambition will be enough to keep it crisp and dry.

You're resume may be dry, but that's still a pink shirt.

YOU’RE SICK

Don’t go to a job interview sick. Coughing up blood will make your interviewers irritable, so they probably won’t hire you unless they decide that you’re even more dedicated for exposing the entire office to tuberculosis. You could cancel, but keep in mind that they probably won’t reschedule. You didn’t really want to write television advertising copy directed towards children anyways, did you?

We learned something important today.

Pepto-Bismol Suitcase

Image from www.werewolves.com. No, really.

I love traveling, but it always makes me sick. No matter how many times nausea strikes my gut at an inconvenient time, I somehow never seem to lose my enthusiasm. I did not regret my trip to Boston even when I was curled in a ball on my bus seat squeezing my knees to my chest and chewing a chalky disk of Pepto-Bismol. I had a sheet of it tucked away in my bag and by the end of the bus ride it was nothing but shredded plastic.

I’ve learned to prepare for the inevitable lurch after lunch – a chocolate chip scone and fudge brownie shortly before my departure was a probably culprit. I got sick in Prague during my first week and I got sick leaving Prague for the United States. I also fell ill in Berlin and Cesky Krumlov and almost every time I’ve ever chugged into New York City on the Metro North.

If I were really practical, I would religiously pack a medium-sized rolling suitcase full of Pepto-Bismol for every voyage. I would fold up an enormous sheet of Pepto-Bismol tablets as small as it would go, like a pink polka-dotted pool tarp. I would pack the neatly folded antacids into the Pepto -pink suitcase, sit on the flap to flatten the air pockets, and zip. I would wheel the onerous load behind me like the queer biological baggage that it is and hoist it onto the next step of the escalator.

In Space

          This is a short story I started in class three or so years ago that I'll probably never finish.... Well, here you go.

***

          Space Commander Dunham awoke from hyper-sleep to see two round pixel eyes staring down at him through five inches of chipped glass. His helmet slowly lowered onto his head and the robot took two heavy steps backwards, letting the Commander’s sleep module open in a cloud of steam. The robot extended a tube of coffee to the yawning space traveler. The Commander sleepily tried to put it to his open mouth and it hit the glass of his helmet.

            Drowsily, he said, “Eugene 3.1, what happened to my sleep module? It’s all chipped. If that glass broke, why, I could have asphyxiated!”

            “I was so lonely,” said the robot, who was awake the whole time. “Hold me.”

            Eugene 3.1 sought comfort in the folds of the Commander’s space suit.

            “But… where’s the rest of the crew?” said the Commander, looking around at the empty, cracked sleep modules. “Are they outside? What planet are we on?”

            Eugene 3.1 stepped to the side to block him from the spacecraft portal. “Yes, what is left of the crew is outside, Commander. We crash landed on Ziploc 5 two months ago. Only Clipper, Garbler, and Quiche survived the landing. However, there was something wrong with the colonists of Ziploc 5. It was discovered to be a space virus. Don’t go outside. I beg you.”

            The heedless Commander pressed a button and the portal opened to the planet outside.

            “My God, I’ve never seen anything like this, Eugene 3.1. What happened…”

            He could find no words. The entire planet was swarming with adorable puppies.

Image Credit: The People Magazine pet section and a preschool education website.

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.

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.

Driver's Ed

I’m sitting in a desk in my old high school and surrounded by sixteen year olds. To my surprise, I am not the oldest person in the room. One guy in the back is probably my mom’s age.

The instructor pops a VHS into the rolling television on the cart and presses play. Cheesy music invoking the eighties quickly fills the room. The dark screen flickers.

A boy is at an arcade, playing a SEGA racing game. He sways back and forth with excitement as his red sports car sweeps skillfully through the course. But then it becomes a real car, and suddenly the car is no longer invincible. This isn’t a game anymore. This is LIFE.

The narrator walks solemnly through a junkyard of crumbling automobiles stacked in ominous towers. He places his hand on a car folded accordion style, knowing that he looks deep and brooding yet boyishly attractive. He knows that, because of this, kids will listen to his message. He presses his neatly combed hair aside and says to us, “Driving is just like a video game, but you’re playing the game of YOUR LIFE.”

These chilling words introduce a scientific study on the recently discovered effects of alcohol on driving. A number of brave Canadians volunteer to drive a car through an obstacle course lined with cones in the wastelands of Canada, and then get hammered and drive through that same obstacle course again.

The experiment begins with the group of strangers grouped casually in the parking lot. Each of the participants slips into the driver’s seat and glides through the meandering path of cones, swerving gracefully to avoid a padded wall.

When they return, they sip from plastic cups of beer administered by scientists and chat civilly. After consuming their first serving of beer, they weave through the course with a few minor scrapes. A second round of beers is passed around. The participants laugh and tell stories that are hilarious. They drive around the course again, tipping over a few unlucky cones.

The method repeats itself until their BACs reach the legal limit, .08. The horde of participants cheers as they take turns funneling beer into each other’s mouths. A male participant gets into the car with his beer helmet still strapped to his head and pounds the gas pedal, careening into the padded wall and laughing uncontrollably. A whole family of cones is sacrificed to science and one remorseful doctor weeps. The male participant continues to drive around the bends of the course with the padded wall still attached to the front bumper and fails to stop at the end, speeding blindly onward to a remote town in the Yukon with two flailing scientists trailing behind.

The narrator appears once more in the junkyard of woe and tosses his cardigan casually across his broad, muscular shoulder. “Teens have too much confidence. They think they're invincible. Do you really think it won’t happen to you?” he asks in an accusing tone.

The scene shifts to the living room of an orange traffic cone that lost a child during a Canadian study on the effects of alcohol on automobile drivers. “He was a good cone,” she says tearfully.

The boy innocently playing the racing game suddenly finds himself in a pair of goggles meant to simulate the blurry vision of a drunk driver. He swerves from wall to wall of the simulated Grand Canyon, loses control of his wheel, falls out of the padded seat onto the arcade floor. He rolls on the dusty concrete desperately trying to ply the goggles from his face, but they are permanently fused to his skin.

The narrator enters. He says, “I want to play a game. The game of your LIFE.”

The boy screams and uselessly tears at the goggles.

“The only thing that will remove the goggles is time,” says the narrator as he crosses the arcade. He casually tucks his hands into the pockets of his pleated pants. The goggles are locked to the gamer’s face until the next morning, when he wakes up in a strange bed with a strange traffic cone and no memory of the terrible things that happened that night at the arcade.

“Driving is the hardest thing in the world. You have to make the right decisions,” the narrator croons from the hood of a totaled car. He is naked from the waist up, but for an ascot.

It’s a sunny summer day in the Yukon and bunch of friends with bushy perms picnic in the Canadian wilderness. A car drives up with a padded wall attached to the bumper. A passenger’s legs are hanging out the window. Five or six people in white coats are running and flailing behind it. This is Stacy’s ride home.

“Stacy, get in the car,” barks Stacy’s boyfriend. But she doesn’t want to get in a car full of angry drunks. Finally, she gives in to his demands and hops into the passenger’s seat. They speed through the scenic country road, drinking and giggling, swerving from one lane to the other, missing a moose by mere inches. A minivan is driving down the same road in the opposite direction. Inside, a family of traffic cones is having a wholesome discussion of gymnastics.

I cannot see what happens next, my eyes are too tightly shut. When I open them, bagpipes are playing Amazing Grace. One doctor is on screen. “If I knew then what I know now about the impairing effects of alcohol on Canadian drivers, would the knowledge be worth the lives that were lost?”

The screen goes black.

What have we learned today?

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.

Along Came a Spider

One night I went outside to gather some oregano for an improvisational bean dip. I approached my patch of herbs with a pair of scissors in hand and jumped as I beheld the most enormous spider web I have ever seen. It stretched from my house to a nearby cedar tree.

The most massive spider I have ever seen (that wasn’t tarantula in a small plastic carrying case with holes on the top) was constructing the outer rings. I suspect that it is one of those spiders from Australia that survive underground for years without water and eat honey badgers. Boy Scout points to anyone who can confirm this baseless speculation.

I ran into the house to fetch my camera-savvy brother. Perhaps I would have found this late night session of nature photography and flashing lights dangerous and invasive were it not for the “PHOTOGRAPH ME” message scrawled in iridescent web. I stood nearby holding an LED flashlight so that my brother could get a good view of the spider.

As we looked on, a fly was caught in the tremendous web and the spider swiftly dove upon it and wound it up like an unwilling bobbin. She left it alone, squirming in an iridescent straightjacket, and went on with her weaving. “This is nature!” I cried.

I carefully picked a few sprigs of oregano that were not bolstering the web to prevent my hand from being mummified in a similar fashion. Nature can be cruel, my friends.