The Mysterious Tenant

Tonight I am writing at a desk. I am not hunched over a glass coffee table with a whale full of truffles, nor am I using an Indian food cookbook balanced on my thighs as a makeshift table. It feels great. When we moved into our new apartment, the landlord kindly bestowed upon us a dresser missing one drawer, a forbidding metal table, a 1970s lamp, two TV stands, and this desk.

“I don’t know about the two TV stands,” I told the landlord, an older Italian man fresh out of a black and white crime film. “We don’t even have one TV yet. But I’ll take the desk.”

I’m sure that I’ve seen this same desk on Craigslist since November. Perhaps this is what destiny feels like. The wood is light-colored and the sides are silvery metal punctured with air holes. It’s marked with marker and blotted with something that could either be nail polish or driveway tar. I don’t know who the previous owner of this desk was, but we can draw some conclusions.

When we first saw the apartment, we were instantly sold on the tacky waiting room wallpaper and the green 1970s toilet.

“You seem like two nice, attractive young people,” the landlord told us. Then we asked him if he would allow a cat.

“Eh,” he said. “I had a bad experience with cats in this apartment. I can’t have a cat spraying on the carpets.”

The last tenant had an unneutered male cat that marked every gym sneaker, couch cushion, and spider plant as his territory. We explained that Olive is female and therefore biologically incapable of spraying, that she is far too well-behaved to ever spray anything, and that we would never keep an unneutered male cat in our home in the first place. Dave offered to pay a pet deposit if necessary and the landlord caved to our attractive youthfulness.

Yesterday we moved in. While everyone else was lugging heavy boxes, Dave’s mom recruited me to help her clean the kitchen and she began wiping down the contact paper inside of the drawers and cupboards.

“What’s this?” Dave’s mom said, reaching into the back of a drawer. She pulled out a tiny black thing. “What is this?”

“That’s a pipe,” Dave explained.

Then, for some reason, everyone smelled it. Curious noses swarmed the pipe, attempting to detect a particular odor from the residue.

My mom told the story of how our neighbor found fifteen thousand dollars in her ceiling when she was renovating. We all had a good laugh because we weren’t nearly so fortunate.

I moved towards the futon, ready to sit down for a long time and leave work irresponsibly incomplete. My goal was to shut off my entire body and stare at one point on the wall like an android for couple of hours, but it was not to be.

“What is this?” said Dave’s mom, emerging from one of the cupboards. “Is this…? Is this a…?”

“Is that a syringe?” I asked, frowning at the brownish tube in her hand, with even lines up the side like a science class beaker. There wasn’t a needle attached, but otherwise it looked an awful lot like a used syringe. “Don’t touch that. Put it down somewhere and don’t touch it. Just throw it away.”

Great, I thought. The drawers are full of pipes, the cupboards are full of syringes, and we haven’t even gotten to the bathroom yet. There is probably a fully functional meth lab in the green 1970s bathtub. We could never walk barefoot in the apartment because there are used needles everywhere and there is a 90% chance of contracting blood borne pathogens from the contact paper under the silverware.

A police siren blared outside. And now we’re going to be arrested, I thought wearily. I washed my hands about six times even though I didn’t even touch the syringe, imagining little AIDS monsters swirling down the drain.

I remembered this dream I once had where someone stabbed my skull with a needle full of heroin.

“Hey! What did you do that for?” I moaned, rubbing the top of my head. “Now I’m going to get a venereal disease and a lifelong addiction.”

I stomped around for the rest of the dream slamming doors, flipping tables, and frowning mercilessly.

Now I’m piecing together the results of my investigation. Due to the scribble of blue marker on the TV stand that Dave accepted from the landlord, the previous tenant had a young child with an unschooled artistic flair. 

Our apartment also has an adjoining nursery that the landlord has claimed as a storage room, which bolsters my speculation.

“Addicts don’t clean themselves,” my mom explained to us from under a Mexican blanket on the futon. “They think bathing ruins their high.”

I’m not sure who provided my mother with this little tidbit, but she seems to think the mysterious former tenant was a bit smelly. Based on the unneutered cat spraying all over the bedding, I cannot argue.

And my desk belonged to this person. Who knows what seedy business came to pass on this very keyboard tray, what terrible things that this manufactured pine surface once witnessed? Beyond this laptop is an aura of mystery that I shall penetrate, right after I wash my hands.

Crunch Time

Having endured five separate leaks in this little sinkhole of an apartment, Dave and I are looking for a new place to live. We have seen twelve apartments to date and still haven’t found a keeper.

Dave started calling real estate agents and on Memorial Day we took a drive to visit one at her office. We arrived first and sat down at the desk. She burst through the door of her office in an American flag T-shirt and introduced herself as Elaine. She shook my hand and held onto it for a long time. Elaine stared at me intently through her darkly shaded sunglasses.

“Oh my god. Do you know who you look like?” Elaine asked. “You know, that girl that everyone says you look like.”

I shrugged. I supposed she was probably thinking of Cindy Lou Who or the flying nun.

“You know who I mean. Come on. That cute little country singer girl,” she prompted, waving her hands.

Clearly we would not be seeing any apartments at all until I produced the name of a cute little country singer.

“Taylor Swift?” I guessed, wincing. The last time I saw my sister she spent hours trying to Swift-ify my hair. I don't want to talk about it.

“YES. You look just like Taylor Swift. Don’t people tell you that all the time?”

“No,” I said.

Dave and Elaine began discussing apartments, but she was quickly reminded of a con man who had been plaguing her all month long. He called her house phone addressing her as a senior citizen and told her that she had won a brand new car. All she had to do was pay the taxes on it and he would deliver it to her house. 

She played along and said that she couldn’t possibly take the car today because she was recovering from hip replacement surgery. The next day he called her back. And the next day.

“Can you believe that this man calls poor senior citizens and takes advantage of them like that? He’s conned more than four hundred senior citizens in this area. You’d think the law would step in, but I called the sheriff myself and do you know what he said? He said that he’d been trailing this guy for weeks and he knew exactly where the con man is: he's sitting pretty in a big house in Jamaica, but there’s nothing they can do. The United States police can’t reach him there.”

Then she turned to me.

“Do you sing?” she asked. I shook my head. “What about dancing? No? Acting?”

“No, I’m a writer,” I said.

“You know what? You should enter a Taylor Swift lookalike contest. Have you ever considered entering a Taylor Swift lookalike contest?”

I admitted that I had not.

“I think you’d really have a chance. You should think about that,” she said. “She is the sweetest girl. She’s just so genuine. I was watching this talk show the other day and Taylor Swift was the guest star. She was talking about how she was driving along in her car and she saw a girl with a Taylor Swift concert T-shirt walking down the street to a record store. So Taylor had her driver pull around and drop her off in front of the record store. She came up behind the girl and just tapped her on the shoulder and said, ‘Thank you. Thank you for being a fan.’”

After listening to more of Taylor Swift’s merits, we took a ride in Elaine's SUV and checked out some apartments. The first one was on the second floor, but somehow had a small, two-tiered yard reminiscent of the ruins of Machu Picchu.

“You could clean this up really nice and put a little patio table right here,” Elaine said.

Inside there was a slight paint odor. The floorboards were warped and lumpy due to the age of the building. I don’t recall there being a bathroom.

The next apartment was in some sort of British estate house that had been transplanted into New York. Elaine presented it as a train car-style apartment. You entered in the bedroom, walked through a door to the living area, and the kitchen was all the way in the back. It was very stupid.

Elaine drove us to the last apartment and we lingered outside of the building.

“I don’t know if you’re going to like this one, but we’ll take a quick look at it. Why not?” Elaine said. “But first I want you to meet some friends of mine…”

Elaine flung open the door to the hair salon on the first floor.

“Hey girls, look who I brought you. It’s Taylor Swift’s sister.”

All of the hairdressers stopped foiling their clients and stared at me, nodding. I waved and scooted away from the door.

The last apartment we saw was occupied by an elderly Greek couple ready to move into their daughter’s house. We barged in just as the woman was frying some fragrant Greek food. They lived in the apartment for thirty-five years and it was actually quite nice. Everything was peach and frilly and smelled like food.

“I could imagine us living here,” Dave said.

I closed my eyes and imagined myself in the kitchen curing olives with the Greek woman. I imagined myself on the couch checking my emails as an old Greek man beside me watches reruns of Married with Children. It was impossible for me to imagine myself living in the apartment without the Greek couple cohabitating with us like the Greek grandparents I never had. But I didn't mind.

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.

Communicating With Cats

I love you, but I also want to eat you.

I once read that cats have the I.Q. of a two-year-old child. That’s fine with me until they begin acting like a two-year-old child. Like many toddlers, my kitten Olive tends to think that all attention is good attention and all repetitive actions are a game. We’re trying to train Olive not to jump on the table when we are cooking and eating, not to bite, and not to claw the tiny ottoman into to a pile of glistening, red polyester fibers.

Yesterday morning when Dave got out of the shower, Olive latched onto his ankle with the force of a small, furry predator. Innocent, zealous ankle-licking quickly transformed into an impulse to devour Dave’s flesh. Claws and teeth were unleashed and Dave gave her a stern talking-to. For some reason, a freshly-showered Dave really whets her appetite. Perhaps she has the archetypical paradox of loving us, yet wanting to eat us.

Shortly after, we found ourselves huddling around my laptop asking the Google how to train cats. This led to a Wiki-How or Ask.Com page about communicating with cats, complete with a how-to video. (Not that we aren't experts in speaking cat.) Soon we were immersed in the world of translating meows with a phrasebook and deciphering meaningful feline body language.

We learned that a low, deep MRRRRooooowww is a sign of displeasure and a high Rrrrrooooowww! is an expression of terror. Subtle differences in the angles and movements of the tail may reveal anxiety, excitement, and aggression.

The subject of clawing and biting was most important to us, so we scrolled down. The article informed us that “a cat will drive his/her claws in and out of you as a sign of happiness or playfulness.” It continued to say, “Either way your cat knows and loves you.” The phrase “drives his/her claws in and out of you” brings to mind more of a stabbing motion with adamantium claws. I’m actually quite glad that my cat doesn’t know and love me that much. I considered editing the article so that it would be less stupid, but then I realized that ninety people already did.

His body language indicates that he knows and loves you.

As far as disciplining a fighting, biting kitten goes, we were advised to shake cans of pennies at her, squirt her with a spray bottle of water, and pick her up by the scruff of her neck and growl in her face like a bear. I have many spray bottles lying around but they are all full of caustic vinegar. “That’ll show her,” thought I.

The idea behind the penny can and spray bottle is that you sneak up on your criminal kitty, catch her in the act, and assault her with loud noises and a shower. We don’t have any cans to put pennies in, but we do have a huge glass fish full of spare change that is Olive's best friend. We considered turning the fish against her and shaking it in her face when she claws the desk chair.

Since the fish is always in the room, whenever she considers leaping onto the table to knock off a plate of poached eggs, she would look back and think, “I can’t do this now. The fish is watching me. The fish is always watching me…”

Today we dropped her into her cardboard carrier and brought her to the veterinarian. The entire car ride was accompanied by the seething sounds of a screaming kitten. At the office, we scooped her out onto a cold steel table. The veterinarian stuck things in her ears and poked around her eyes. He told us that our kitten has conjunctivitis and that there’s only a 95% chance of recovery. Then he said that some cats get a strain of the virus that never goes away and they walk around for fifteen years with trailing eye mucus behind them like hairy snails.

“Any tips for teaching a kitten not to bite?” I asked.

“You’re not encouraging it, are you?” he asked. “My brother used to play tug-of-war with his cat, and now the cat is insane.”

“I don’t think so,” I answered.

“I would pick her up by the scruff of her neck,” the vet said, snatching Olive up by the neck-skin. “And I would shake her and say, ‘Good kitties don’t bite' in a sterner voice than I’m speaking in now. Because that’s what a mother cat would do if Olive bit. The mother would pick her up by the neck... and throw her.”

The vet decided that today Olive would get a rabies shot. Olive panicked and looked for an emergency exit as the veterinarian produced an enormous syringe and wiped an alcohol pad across her back. She desperately moved towards the carrier, probably trying to communicate something to us through meows and body language: “Okay guys, I’ll get in the carrier! I love the carrier! Look at me! I want to get inside of the carrier now…”

The vet called in his assistant, who grabbed Olive by the scruff of her neck and, once again, began to shake her.

“The kitten might cry a little,” the veterinarian said as he plunged the syringe into her back. Once again, the kitten screamed. I quite nearly screamed myself.

When the vet and assistant released her, Olive stumbled towards Dave. He lifted her carefully into the cardboard carrier. I comforted her with my shrill female voice that cats love all the way to the apartment. “We’re almost home. Far away from that bad, bad man who kept shaking you and sticking needles into your skin. What a bad, mean-spirited person.”

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.

Wood

I have about two and a half weeks before I leave for Prague, so I’m trying to focus on the important things that absolutely need to be done before I leave, such as refurbishing antique furniture. The furniture in question—two dressers, a headboard, and a matching mirror—is not necessarily antique. My mother acquired these pieces at a garage sale over the weekend for an unusually low price. They are going to replace the rickety wicker set that my cats have been using for a scratching post for the past fifteen years.

The pieces seem to be oak, and they are probably not actually antique. I noticed nearly the same set in Home Décor Magazine under the title “Inspired by Paris Flea Market Finds” and surrounded by several dozen Eiffel Towers of assorted sizes.

On Monday, my sister and I tackled the smaller set of drawers and we began to realize why the pieces were so inexpensive. We attacked the splotches of sticky goop in the top drawer with lemon juice on an old sponge. I was going to use an actual lemon, but my mom berated me for cleaning with an expensive citrus fruit. I used a bottle of Nature’s Nectar 100% Lemon Juice from Concentrate, which Mom insisted was the same thing anyways.

Since the lemon juice is far less precious than the lemons themselves, I made sure to use as much of the juice as possible and cleaned the entire dresser with it, as well as the mirror and headboard. If there was anything sticky, I avoided it early on.

After the lemon bath, there seemed to be several infinitely impossible problems to tackle. Cleaning the top of the dresser, I noticed the name “BOB” carved into the wood. I was annoyed that it could not have been a more imaginative name. A name more appropriate for furniture that seems to be inspired by Art Nouveau would have sufficed. I think “ALGERNON,” for instance, is a charming name. There’s something in that name that seems to inspire absolute confidence.

A few inches away I discovered “STEVE.” I could find only one place where the varnish was somewhat intact. It looks as if there was a table runner at some point protecting the wood from such crude adolescents as BOB and STEVE. The condition of the long dresser causes me to suspect that it was left outdoors for a while, but that the table runner was left in place.

I can think of no methods for removing the names that don’t involve destroying the wood or burning the dresser to the ground. The chips in the wood and the rusted pulls I can take, but the names make me feel as though I’m locked in a room with a bunch of insider jokes that I’m not allowed in on.

My sister and I took out the drawers. When she set one of the lemon-soaked sponges onto the unfinished wood inside of the drawer-crevice, it instantly turned black in the dust, which was at least an inch high. We broke out Venus, my pink vacuum cleaner for my dorm room. My sister vacuumed the drawers while I lemoned up the mirror. Every once and I while she would start screaming “Spiders! Spiders!” or “There’s cobwebs in the drawer! They’re black! Why are they black?!?” Then I would take over until the spiderly remains were careening down Venus’ rubber tube.

We were about to start vacuuming the inside of the dresser when my sister pointed out some paper in the top drawer-crevice. “Is it a forgotten private manuscript?!?” I cried, diving into the drawer-crevice for the stack of loose-leaf. I have been reading Either/Or by Soren Kierkegaard, which unfairly raised my hopes. Unfortunately, the yellowing lined pages did not contain a philosophical correspondence between BOB and STEVE. I was disappointed to find them all blank.

My sister had to vacuum the inside of the dresser because the sound of the brush attachment on unfinished wood, for me, is like nails on a chalkboard or a screaming kitten. I did need to assist with the removal of a spider, the species of which may have become extinct since the last time the drawer was removed about a hundred years ago.

I polished all of the rusted pulls with a paste of vinegar, salt, and flour. When I got the paste on the wood, I promptly wiped it with a wet sponge. After a few hours of this tedious work, I realized that the wet sponge was just spreading it around. I wiped it thoroughly with a second wet sponge. This time, it looked as though I destroyed the varnish. The catastrophe was much like the time Spongebob and Patrick got white paint on Mr. Krabs’s first dollar.

I had about a day’s worth of anxiety that I ruined new old furniture. Last night at about ten I was unable to bear the suspense and I wiped the dresser with a polish that was essentially homemade salad dressing. This seems to have done the trick. The only thing left to do now is get the smell out of the drawers. Baking soda and vinegar don’t seem to be doing the trick. I’m worried that the smell is mothballs, in which case all the plastic in the world will decompose before the smell dissipates.

Today I intend to tackle the taller dresser in a similar manner. I’m on the lookout for new species of spiders and a carving of “BOB+STEVE 4EVER.”

Another Word for Bird

Let there be an outdoor deck with beige planks hot from sun exposure in the shadow of a white house surrounded by woods. Then let it be populated with potted annuals, a hibiscus, and a prehistoric canna extending a red bloom approximately two feet above my head.  Furnish this outdoor living space with stylish weatherproof furniture from Target’s Patio and Garden department, and do not omit the fountain of Buddha that ceases to spurt water whenever the sun descends behind a billowing cumulus cloud.

Then, if you will, paint me a black wicker couch with faded, orange cushions and a glass topped table. Let this table be strewn with white index cards, smudged with the dark ink of a Pentel click pen which sits atop a striped notebook, a Czech/English Dictionary, and a copy of Casanova’s autobiography stacked one upon the other. On the table, paint me a floral tea cup in Christmas colors, filled with water because at home I only take beverages in teacups. Paint me a black and white cat lounging on an orange cushion and, beside the couch, a Venus flytrap photosynthesizing. (In ten minute intervals, so as to prevent a brush fire.)

Somewhere between the cat and the flytrap you may sketch me onto the couch however you’d like, because I prefer to be mysterious. Perhaps I am holding an index card with the Czech word for “purple,” attempting all seven syllables without breaking to take my inhaler. Perhaps I am distracted by a small black dog of German descent which is yipping and begging at my feet. Begging for what? Knowledge, I assume.

This is a reasonably clear picture of how I’ve been spending my free time. I have one month left to work on my Czech language skills, and I have encountered sources suggesting that I use pneumonics to easily remember new words. I decided I would make index cards with the Czech word and a picture to help me remember it.

Going through the flashcards after the fact, I realize that some are more confusing than helpful. The word for “purple” (cervenofialovy) is accompanied by a sketch of an eggplant, but every time I see it I have to think about what it’s supposed to be. I don’t know why eggplants were the first thing to come to mind that day when I thought about purple, but it will probably never happen again.

I used birds as the pictures on at least five of the cards. I paired the word for “yellow” (zluty) with a rubber duck, but when I come across the card and see the picture, I think, “Bird.” I thought of peacocks when I was drawing a picture to accompany the word for “blue” (modry). When I see peacock on the card, I think of neither blue nor peacocks. I think: “Bird.” In my mind there are several words that mean “bird,” but none of them actually mean “bird.”

I have a similar problem with my “May” card, which depicts a inscrutable sketch of the Mayflower, steered into Plymouth Rock by a stick figure pilgrim. I see the card, and I think: “Boat.” For morning I scribbled a cranky looking cartoon of a man drinking coffee, but the coffee looks like beer and he looks like an angry drunk. I’m not worried that I will confuse it with the word “beer,” because even the shakiest beginner knows that one.

I drew a teapot on my card for “tea” (Caj, pronounced “chai,” oddly enough. Do I see evidence of the Indo-European language branch?). The teapot slowly morphed into an elephant while I was drawing it, and now that card just confuses me altogether.