Perusing

All I want to do is leave the country. I have been daydreaming about it often since the last time I left the country. On a weekly basis, I torment all of those around me with stories of Romani kids and cheese-toting anarchists in the Czech Republic. Then I think about having another adventure. This all-consuming wanderlust often manifests itself in the form of looking at pictures of rainbow buildings in Argentina or teaching myself useful Polish phrases or reading an entire website about Bulgarian cuisine while at work. My workplace environment only enables me by making it extremely easy for me to spend an entire shift reading about Bulgarian cuisine.

Finally, some real progress. Dave and I are going to Peru in November. I will have someplace useful to channel this energy. Now here is a photo montage of pictures from Google Images!

Ruins!

Alpacas!

Chocolate!

Ceviche!

Wild camelids!

Peru is one country that Dave and I both can agree on. I’ve wanted to visit Machu Picchu since I was a wee beastie. I saw Matt Lauer traveling there on the morning news while eating my Fruity Pebbles and I thought, “Yes. I shall go there.” Last year I met some kids from Lima and got a favorable impression of that city as well. Did you know it is the Gastronomy Capital of the Americas? I’m not sure who has the privilege of awarding such titles, but I intend to find out if it is well-deserved. Peru is a great exporter of cocoa beans, so I can’t help but imagine chocolate gushing from the alleys like floodwater. And if there is good chocolate then I could easily live off of that for ten days (or until I get a chocolate hangover).

But chocolate addictions aside, I may need to start eating fish again to be able to survive in Lima. My last few experiences with fish have involved unparalleled bellyaches. Peru is famous for ceviche, which I tried with Dave several years ago. Instead of cooking the fish, it is prepared with lemon juice and spices. The lemon juice is supposed to kill the bacteria and parasites. We went to a restaurant near our college and ordered some sort of pink-fish-ceviche. It was delicious, but we both felt very weird during the car ride home. My whole body felt loopy. I didn’t know it at the time, but the feelings of loopy-ness were just hallucinations brought on by food poisoning.

I told a friend from Lima about my ceviche experience. “You shouldn't be eating that outside of Peru,” she gently chided.

One night after I came home from work, Dave and I stitched together the skeleton of the whole adventure in one big marathon. Dave found some not-so-expensive round trip plain tickets; I arranged our accommodations. We tried to buy our tickets to Machu Picchu ahead of time. Apparently, it is not so difficult to buy the tickets in Cusco the night before or the morning of the trip.

Huayna Picchu, the misty and impressive mountain peak that one sees in all pictures of the ruins, is a little harder to tackle spontaneously. You need to buy the tickets in a package with Machu Picchu. Only 400 people are allowed to climb it a day and you have to go through Peru’s government website to book it ahead of time. Peru’s website is notoriously screwy, however, so we had no luck in procuring any tickets ahead of time. Officially, it only takes Visa cards. In reality it does not even take Visa cards.

We also missed out on buying our lunch ahead of time from the only buffet-style restaurant at the peak of this precious ancient treasure. I suppose we will just bring sandwiches.

I began to consider what sort of footwear one would wear for the climb. Normally I would wear my barefoot shoes for hiking, but I wondered if something more heavy-duty would be necessary. Google provided us with heaps of wisdom. Some people climbed it in sneakers, others in Teva sandals. One person recommended that we wear two pairs of socks. He said that a friend recommended that he wear two pairs of socks and, though he can no longer remember the excellent reason, he now wears two pairs of socks every day.

While we have the skeleton of the trip pieced together, there are still other important things that need to be addressed. I need to bring my level of Spanish to at least conversational-caveman level in the next two months. I can hardly remember anything from my Rosetta Stone lessons from last year, but I really hope to see some women eating rice in Peru so I can make intelligent remarks. And at least one alpaca, which I will ardently embrace.

Let's Read Short Stories

It’s National Short Story Month. It’s also National Poetry Month, although it seems rather unfair that the two writing forms that have to compete for a single month. One of my goals is to read 26 short story collections and anthologies by the end of 2013. I’m reading a lot of women writers particularly, because they don’t get enough love. Not even from me, a woman. So far I’m on the tenth book. I’m a slow reader, easily distracted by online literary journals and articles about the fiber content of ground flax.

I told a friend at work, an avid reader of romance novels, that I was reading short story collections for a while and she was surprised.

“I didn't know authors wrote books of short stories,” she said.

Quite understandable. Until rather recently, they were considered unmarketable. I suppose the last time she saw a book of short stories, it was a fifth grade English textbook – a time in life that no one likes to look back on. Or maybe it was a collection of fairy tales or Greek myths. I didn't know I liked short stories until I read Poe and Kafka in high school, but I always loved fairy tales and myths of all sorts.

Some very good reasons to read short stories: You can read a short story on a fifteen minute bus ride. You can read a few short stories on a forty minute train ride. You can read a short story on your cell phone now. You can squeeze one in at the end of your lunch break. And if your job happens to be waiting for a phone to ring, you can read stories in between calls and not feel as jolted out of the story as you would reading Mark Z. Danielewski’s 27 volume opus about cats.

Here are some short story collections and anthologies that fill me with immense readerly pleasure. This list features entirely women, because they don’t get enough love. If you have a penchant for the surreal, absurd, uncanny, and grotesque, you would probably appreciate these. If not, click here to be led away from this nonsense forever, as it will annoy you and furrow your brow. And if you would like to discuss the beneficial lignans in ground flax, feel free to contact me on the “Contact” page.

1. Magic for Beginners by Kelly Link

Kelly Link might be my favorite living short story writer at the moment. The cover says, “A Best Book of the Decade.” I thought to myself, “That is, indeed, a haughty claim.” This book lives up to the hype on its cover. Kelly and her husband, a sci-fi writer, had to create their own press just to publish her first collection. At the time, short stories were considered to be unmarketable and her stories also don’t conform to one genre. They are a mix of experimental literary fiction, horror, fantasy, sci-fi, myth, fairy tale, and surrealism. Ghosts, zombies, and fairies are presented in unique ways. They present you with uncanny pajamas or dog fur handbags. A ghost wife gets divorced from her living husband in Disney World; the Devil gets Seven Minutes of Heaven with a cheerleader. Kelly Link does magical things with sentences. Whenever you think you know where the story is going, you really don’t.

Definitely read: “Magic for Beginners,” “Lull,” and “The Faerie Handbag.”

2. Museum of the Weird by Amelia Gray

I read a lot of these stories multiple times and I never get sick of them. These stories are mostly very short, have unusual forms, and make me laugh loudly but also make me deeply depressed. It’s an emotional roller-coaster to say the least. The collection lives up to its name with characters feasting on their own hair and toes, an armadillo hitting on a penguin in a bar, and a guy who marries a bag of frozen tilapia. Click here to get threatened by the author.

Definitely read: “Babies,” “The Cottage Cheese Diet,” “Trip Advisory: The Boyhood Home of Former President Ronald Reagan,” and “Code of Operation: Snake Farm.”

3. Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls by Alissa Nutting

Alissa Nutting has an awesome brain and I would pay thousands of dollars for it in an Ebay bid. This is a very funny book. The humor sometimes reminds me of Futurama, maybe because there is an intergalactic deliverywoman in it. You may wonder what unclean jobs it features. There’s a porn star who is paid to have sex with a game show contestant on the moon, a human ant colony, and a romantic funeral home employee who smokes blunts stuffed with the hair of the dead. I'm kind of in love with the "Sweedishy" model Garla (just like everyone else is) and the experimental rock singer who wears a tight leather jumpsuit with a butt-flap so he can easily relieve himself anywhere. So many characters that I love. So much awesome.

Definitely read: “Dinner,” “Model’s Assistant,” and “Bandleader’s Girlfriend.”

4. Fantastic Women, an anthology of stories from Tin House

Here is an anthology of 18 stories by women writers that are uncanny, absurd, and surreal, all bound together behind underwhelming cover art that doesn't really fit. Kelly Link is here; Alissa Nutting is here. There are quite a few authors that I had never read before that I love now. The women in these stories undergo metamorphoses, travel between pocket universes, and socialize with lonely circus dwarfs. Sometimes they are tied up and suspended from the ceiling of their charming suburban homes. There are  even werewolves and somehow I don’t want to punch them.

Definitely read: “Dinner,” “Abroad,” “The Wilds,” and “The Entire Predicament.”

5. St. Lucy’s Home forGirls Raised by Wolves by Karen Russell

Last year I got an email from a former professor suggesting that I read this collection. She knows me too well. The narrators of these stories are precocious children on an imaginary island near Florida. They lure baby turtles out of the sea, learn to behave like humans, and follow the Oregon Trail with a Minotaur. Their voices are wonderful; you want to give them a hug even when they make atrocious mistakes.

Definitely read: “Ava Wrestles the Alligator,” “Z.Z.’s Sleep-Away Camp for Disordered Dreamers,” and “St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves.”

The Inevitability of the French Fry

I sat wedged between two Turkish students nibbling cheeseburgers in Woodbury Commons. I was the only person outside of the MacDonald’s restaurant without food, daydreaming about frozen desserts.

Usually I do not get paid to peruse discounted brand name merchandise with international students, but the group leader for the Turkish kids flew back to her sales office in Istanbul and left the group unsupervised for the weekend. One girl, Beren, was older than the other students and took charge of the group. There wasn’t much for me to do but make sure they all got to the outlets and back without breaking their legs.

They had already been to the outlets on the fourth of July and now they were just buying souvenirs from friends. When I ask international students why they wanted to come to New York, the word “shopping” is invariably upon their lips. Clothes, handbags, sunglasses, watches – it’s all cheaper in the US.

With little money and a lot of time, I followed Beren and her young friend, Pinar, through the Gap and Armani Exchange and gave bad fashion advice with the best intentions. I couldn’t remember the last time I went shopping with girls.

“Which of these shirts do you like better?” asked Beren, holding up two white American Eagle shirts with red logos, one of which was slightly faded. Squinting slightly, I pointed to the brighter one. I watched them try on tee-shirts over their tee-shirts.

After, Pinar and I dug through a bin of underwear labeled, “4 for $10.” In spite of my resolve to spend no money, I started picking out pairs of cheap underwear. At least I’m not spending frivolously, I thought. Underwear is a necessity of life.

“Where can I go to a Victoria’s Secret?” Pinar asked, tossing aside a pair of extra-large lace-backed panties.

“Just so you know,” I said, “Victoria’s Secret is still pretty expensive here. You can spend, like, forty dollars on one bra there.”

I lifted my breasts slightly as I said the word bra because I find that communication goes more smoothly when I talk with my hands.

“What was that word you used?” Pinar asked.

“Bra,” I repeated. “Bra. But really, they’re, like, forty dollars.”

My mind simply cannot justify forty dollar undergarments.

“Bra,” said Pinar.

“I want just one to take home,” said Beren. “I will buy.”

Among Turkish ladies, I discovered that “I will buy” can be a complete sentence.

“The Gap tee-shirts are eighty US dollars in Istanbul,” Beren explained, contemplating shelf of twelve dollar tees. “I will buy.”

After many hundreds of US dollars were dropped on watches and shoes and handbags, I followed Beren and Pinar to the food pavilion. The word “pavilion” might indicate an establishment that is just as sophisticated as the designer outlets the pavilion keeps company with. Inside, we found pizza, tacos, and Au Bon Pain. This food court fare did not interest the two girls and they went to MacDonalds. We joined the rest of the group at a table outside of the MacDonald’s joint. The Turkish language reigned supreme and I had no idea what was going on.

“Kdeiomcr erjkwjhod kdjsjoe System of a Down adfadewtn,” one girl said.

Okay, they’re talking about music, I thought to myself.

“Please, Brittany, have a fry,” said Beren, pushing her large box of fries towards me. “Please.”

“No, thanks,” I said.

“You have nothing,” she pouted. “Please. I beg you. It’s potato, Brittany.”

“No, I know what it’s made of. I’m okay. Really.”

“But it’s so much food,” she said.

No matter where you’re from, you must know what you’re getting yourself into when you order a large fry in America. You made your salty, deep-fried bed and you can sleep in it. She dipped a fry into a white sauce and I asked her what it was.

“People here usually dip fries into ketchup,” I said.

“This sauce… this is good. You must try it, Brittany,” Beren said.

I’m usually inhumanly immune to peer-pressure. Some combination of curiosity and a desire to not be offered any more fries compelled me to take the smallest one and dip it into the white sauce. And… disappointment. I tasted ranch dressing and salt.

“Thanks,” I said with lukewarm enthusiasm. I hadn’t eaten a MacDonald’s French fry since I was sixteen. I left the group for a moment to purchase a salad from the Au Bon Pain and rethink my life.

In the car that evening, Dave lectured me on the inevitability of the French fry.

“You thought you could avoid MacDonald’s for the rest of your life? You can’t. I predict that someday, before you die, you will eat another MacDonald’s French fry. Someday you will be traveling and you will be starving and after walking for miles you will come to a MacDonald’s restaurant. You will buy fries because that is the only food for miles around and you will eat those fries whether you like it or not because you need that food to live.”

Disaster Bus

I arrived at my place of employment at precisely 8:45 pm on June 16, 2012, where a rented car was waiting for me just outside of the door.

“Are you… Brittany?” said the driver of the vehicle. He opened the door and I climbed into the backseat, which contained all of the modern conveniences. Peppermints, bottled water. I tightly hugged my tote full of folders and lanyards as we embarked upon our adventure.

The driver and I talked about pistachio ice cream, train rides through Eastern Europe, and the meat industry. I confessed my worries about getting twenty-one Vietnamese kids through the airport terminal.

“You’re selling yourself too short, Brittany,” said the driver. “Don’t sell yourself short.”

“Maybe I am. What’s the worst that can happen, anyways?”

The drive went quickly and I took my bag and my clipboards to the terminal. I looked for Hanoi on the board of arriving flights and only saw Paris, Istanbul, and Taipei. At that point I was absolutely certain that I was already in the wrong place. A French woman in a headscarf approached me asking me, in French, the best way to get into Manhattan. Soon I was playing the role of the translator as she discussed the least expensive mode of transportation with an airport employee. It was exhilarating.

I raced back to the gate, which was just as barren as I’d left it. Employees in suits and bellboy uniforms paced around leisurely in the proximity of some unclaimed baggage. I must have missed the group. The Vietnamese kids came and left and were probably taking scam artist taxis all the way to the school for a meager $500 per student. I bugged the employees again and they assured me the plane had been late and the kids were probably just getting to customs.

A flood of people who looked like they might be from Taiwan flooded through, dragging bags and embracing their families beyond the gate. Time passed. Suddenly everyone was Turkish and I did the only thing I could do: I whined to the airport employees again. Are there any more Vietnamese people back there? Are you sure? Am I really in the right terminal? They comforted me by saying that my group was probably still in customs and it could take a long time if they’ve never been to the US before. I called the emergency number to inform the school that my group was very late.

About an hour and a half later I was approached by a woman who appeared to be of Middle Eastern decent and two kids, all wearing tee-shirts from my school. She pointed at my clipboard from the international school and waved to me. This cannot be, I thought. They don’t look Vietnamese at all. Who do these people think they are, pretending to be Vietnamese? But then again, just because they don’t look Vietnamese doesn’t mean they don’t live in Vietnam. Perhaps they emigrated. There is nothing wrong with emigrating. People emigrate every day. I handed her a folder labeled “Group Leader” and welcomed her to New York.

“Are there twenty-two of you?” I asked urgently.

They smiled and nodded and I quickly determined that they didn’t actually speak English. Maybe they weren’t part of my group after all. Then I took back the folder and I called the emergency number.

“Hello, is part of my group Turkish? I haven’t found a large group of Vietnamese kids, but I do have three Turks and… they seem to want to go with me.”

Just then a beeline of Vietnamese kids in blue and pink tee-shirts emerged from the crowd, waving enthusiastically.

“Uh, hold on, I think I found the Vietnamese group. I’m just going to go greet them now. I’ll call you back,” I told the emergency contact and hung up. “Welcome to New York!”

The leader of the group explained that one girl was still detained in customs. A Vietnamese person with the same name had come through JFK earlier that day and airport security deemed her suspicious. They were going to hold on to her indefinitely.

From across the room, the Middle Eastern family gave me a wave and indicated that they had found their ride, a man with a black driver’s hat and a sign. I was relieved that they weren’t my responsibility after all.

I introduced myself to clusters of drowsy kids who rolled around on baggage carts and wandered off to the bathrooms without any supervision. I attempted to learn their names. Every once and a while a man would come from customs and tell us we had to keep waiting. A little before one in the morning the girl we were waiting for finally emerged from customs – not an imposter after all, it turns out. I called the emergency number again to tell them that everything was finally okay.

Once we boarded the bus, I handed out their student I.D. cards. Every time I read a name, the bus erupted with muffled giggles. Am I saying something dirty? I asked myself after each name. After four names, I passed the load of name tags off to the group leader.

I explained the rules of the school, such trivialities as why they can’t drink, why they can’t smoke in their rooms, why they can’t pull the fire alarm at their leisure. Sometime after I tackled the subject of urinating in public areas, the group leader told me that a student realized his passport was missing. We were halfway to the school and it was one in the morning. I whipped out my cell phone and dialed the emergency number. They said we would just have to turn the bus around and find it. A collective sigh rose from the bus seats, mine among them.

A half hour later we were at JFK airport once again. I paced the bus aisles while the student and group leader rummaged through the luggage compartment of the bus and the bus driver scoured the pavement in search of scattered documents. After a long search, they returned with a passport.

“It was in the back of the bus all along,” the group leader announced.

I called the emergency number.

“We found the passport. We’re on our way. For real, this time.”

When I lead the army of half-asleep students with rolling suitcases into their dormitory at 2:30 in the morning, a crowd of students smoking outside of the door greeted us with applause. I didn’t get home myself until 3:00.

Let's Learn Spanish

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

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

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

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

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

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.”

Prostate Cherries

One day in Montreal, Dave and I went to the Jean Talon Marketplace near Little Italy. On either side of us wine vendors passed out samples and wedges of smelly cheese were plopped onto scales. We stopped in front of a produce stand that displayed cartons of an unusual green fruit with a papery outer layer, similar to onion skin.

“I think it’s a tomatillo,” I said, recalling a similar fruit I had on one of my last nights in Prague with a kiwi-like flavor.

A French-speaking man gave us each a piece of the alleged tomatillo to sample. Peeling the skin off, Dave asked the name of the fruit. The French-speaking man sent us an English-speaking man to deal with our English speaking.

“It’s a ground cherry,” the English-speaking man announced, baffling us both, for neither of us had heard of a ground cherry before. “It’s called a ground cherry because you don’t pick them off the tree. You wait for them to fall on the ground. That’s when you know they’re ripe.”

The French-speaking man pushed a half empty-carton of ground cherries towards me and I picked them up. Dave and I each took one cherry and attempted to return the carton.

“No, take them,” the English-speaking man insisted. I took the free food. “He gave them to you. And they’re good for you, but especially for you.” He pointed to Dave.

“I eat a carton of these every day,” the English-speaking man continued. “They’re good for the prostate.”

I passed the carton of ground cherries to Dave. Perhaps he needed them more than I did.

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.

My Future Illustrating Career

My senior project is becoming an ugly comic book. During my last senior project meeting, my adviser suggested that I draw an image for the cover. "I'll get to work on some stick figures," I said. "Whatever you want," she said. After advising me for several months and watching me turn my original project into an extensive series of sex jokes, she no longer expects me to be serious. This is for the best.

The following cartoons are illustrations,from my short story collection (with one dramatic work), "Grownups." Once again, I have resorted to the impressive technology of photographing them with my digital camera and shamelessly posting them on the internet. Please talk me out of using them.

Cover?

The Diary of Stanley Amadeus Pope

Babymaking

Magic Tricks

Grownups (The play)

or

or...

Perhaps I won't be an illustrator when I grow up after all.

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

This is why I didn't get the job.

Dear Sir/Madam:

As an undergraduate student at Purchase College, I am grateful to have the opportunity to use my creative writing experience towards your startup website — grateful to be considered for any job at all. I believe that I am an ideal candidate to create content for your upstarting website with a loving and prematurely arthritic hand. I hope to engage you with my copies, thrill you with my copies of copies, and deconstruct the flimsy cardboard structure of “the box” which imprisons the thoughts of many.

Not only am I a mere semester away from being a proud owner of a tastefully framed degree, but I am currently the proud owner of SKILLS and EXPERIENCE. I recently volunteered as the English language proofreader for the Prague-based theological journal Communio Viatorum, for which I worked with theologians to preserve the meaning of their translated works. I successfully undertook this responsibility with no knowledge of theology beyond what a saw in the movie Angels and Demons. Last spring I interned as a Learning Assistant for an American history class and was required to design PowerPoint review sessions gripping enough to almost hold the attention of one hundred students who did not want to be there.

I voluntarily authored the script of the Purim Dragball Masquerade, the lovechild of the Purchase College chapter of Hillel and GLBTU. Two of my short stories have been included in Purchase College’s annual literary magazine Italics Mine. I am accomplished in using the tools made available through Blogger and my personal blog is consistently read by several people.

I hope you will keep me in mind when selecting “fun and creative interns” for your “self-maintaining database website.” Please consider reading the attached résumé and writing sample.

Regards,


Brittany Shutts

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 One

I am educated by a wealthy patron who sees in me the potential to become a scholar or a corrupt official in the local government. I am sent away and boarded in another city where I become worldly, cultured, and fluent in Greek. When I return to my patron he is boundlessly impressed by my Greek and the witticisms that I produce at his dinner table to amuse ladies in powdered wigs. He insists that I come to dinner every Tuesday and recite sonnets and essays I effortlessly compose when I am not shadowing a controversial, bearded philosopher who thinks of me as his own son and frequently clutches me to his own breast. My patron commissions me to write comedies for his amusement, and in my free time I write stories.

How Prague Will Make Me Gain One Thousand Pounds

My Czech-English tandem partner—I’ll call her M. for the sake of privacy and mysteriousness—brought me to a Czech restaurant to eat a typical Czech lunch: Three dumplings the size of baseballs filled with strawberry jelly with strawberries, syrup, chocolate sauce, powdered sugar, and several mountains of whipped cream covering every inch of a rather large plate. The meal was so large that neither of us could push ourselves to eat a third dumpling. 

While we practiced our Czech, I asked her how to say “candy” and related stories of delicious Hungarian pastries filled with a sweet ricotta-like cheese and slices of peach. Lately I’ve been compulsively turning the conversation to food—food that I’ve eaten, food that I want to eat, food that I want to make. Right now my focus is on pumpkins. With a pumpkin sitting on my counter, looking delicious, how can I possibly refrain from daydreaming about a whole week of eating pumpkin soup, raw pumpkin (it tastes like carrot, only better), stuffed pumpkin, baked pumpkin (it tastes like carrot, only better). M. said, “You’re rather skinny for someone who likes food so much.” “Not for long,” I answered with my mouth full of whipped creamy goodness.

This morning I went down to the breakfast room of Komenskeho and discovered that, in the night, all of the fresh oranges and peaches had magically transformed into chocolate cake with a layer of creamy mousse, all of the yogurt had become pudding, and all of the cereal had become Coco Puffs. “Is this all for me? Am I dreaming?” thought I, making my usual cucumber sandwich. Who am I kidding? I went right for the cake. I prudently cut it in half and proceeded to eat both halves. The Komenskeho staff has always graced the buffet with danishes and doughnuts, but things are getting increasingly out of hand. I suspect that they may be fattening us up to roast us for an upcoming holiday feast.

I rode my sugar high to a gallery with my dorm mother and some friends. After an hour or so of looking at Andy Warhol and Rene Magritte and having security guards mock my name in Czech, I met the rest of the group in the gallery’s restaurant. Every establishment in Prague comes complete with its own dining establishment so that you’re never more than ten feet away from your next diabetic shock. I asked if there were any vegetarian meals, and the woman pointed me to a smaller version of the fruit dumplings from before. These were more like ravioli than baseballs, little pockets of fruit jam or sweet cheese covered in cream and chocolate and almonds. My friend and I split an enormous plate and finished every one.

Tonight I’m editing some scholarly documents that have been translated into English, and I may have absentmindedly consumed half of my groceries.  I cringe with every bite of leftover pasta and musli, imagining the staff of the Ruzyne Airport rolling me through the terminal like Violet Beauregard and strapping me to the tail of the airplane. Then I say to myself: Tomorrow I will exercise.

The Country that Remembered Vegetables

I’m starting a new routine. Every Tuesday, I get up at eight in the morning, eat a cucumber sandwich in the breakfast room, and set out with my grocery bag. I make the long commute by tram, metro, and tram again to Kubanske Namesti where I follow a long chain of old people off the tram. The old people and I slowly migrate across the street to the park to the farmer’s market.

As I enter the marketplace, I see fruits and vegetables stacked in crates and sausages behind glass. The Czech specialties seem to be potatoes and plums, and apples are everywhere now that they’re in season. My mind is blown when I see a green cauliflower with bizarre alien projections. (My research has led me to discover that it is a Veronica cauliflower. Here it is, in all of his psychedelic glory.)

A man selling honey elaborates on the different kinds of honey and I nod and say “dobre” as though I understand what he’s saying. The only jar of honey I’m certain of says “flower” in Czech on the front, so I splurge for a delicious topping for my giant tub of yogurt. The vendor gives me a glass of “most.” I assume it’s cider because it tastes like cider, but if it has some alcohol content I can’t taste the difference.

I’m looking for a pumpkin that I can lift. There are pumpkin like squashes and various gourds to choose from, but the only pumpkins I find are the size of horses and would be an inconvenience to others on the tram. I find a good sized, pumpkin-like specimen that is half green and half orange. I ask a nearby woman with a pumpkin, “Jite?” (You eat?) She confirms that it is food.

With a small pumpkin in my bag and carbohydrates on the brain I get a loaf of bread at random and a few small rolls. My final splurge is a box of raspberries. I figure they’re so out of season that I may never have the opportunity to put them in my Czech yogurt.

This pescetarian paradise has a stand where you can purchase vegetarian Indian food, one for chocolate truffles, and fried fish fresh from the Vltava (which is a fantastic tongue twister). The pastries and cookies are innumerable and the choices that one makes between them are heart-wrenching.

Cuban cigars are available for those who actually go to farmer’s markets for that sort of thing. One can even buy a jar of chocolate honey cream, which Aztec priests used as a lubricant when removing the organs of their victims. I would want some to spread on my toast.

Intense Czech

After two days of my Czech intensive course, I am certain my professor is Bernadette Peters’ grandmother. If I’m going to spend nearly five hours a day with any professor, I would want it to be Jitka. Everything is dramatic with her. We must smile broadly as we say dobry den, get angry when we ask were the beer is, and never wish a Czech “Dobry rano” on the tram because they are grumpy in the morning and they will kick you. When we perform even the smallest feat of pronunciation correctly, she says,"Gooooooood" in the manner of the witch in Hansel and Gretel.

Czechs are strange people, Jitka explains. You will never hear a Czech say she has money and you will never hear her say she has time. If you ask her how she is, she will thank you and tell you things are terrible, or perhaps so-so. You will never hear her say that things are excellent because something terrible might happen tomorrow. A Czech will use the moment as an opportunity to complain about how he has no money or time. If there is one thing Czechs love to do, it’s complain.

Some invaluable phrases I’ve learned from Jitka:

Cas je penize. (Time is money.)
To je zivot. (That’s life.)
To je skoda. (What a pity.)

Skoda is also a popular car manufacturer based in the Czech Republic, and the brand name of the car is Pity, which is all part of the Czech passion for complaining.

Czechs also love beer, says Jitka. You may come to Prague and see cheap beer, but it is not good for diet. That is why many Czech men have large bellies. For them, five beers in a day is nothing. But beer is more expensive now, it used to be two crowns. Then, fifteen beers in a day was nothing for them. If you come to Prague and drink cheap beer and eat cheap food, it is not good for diet. It is disaster.

The more I’m in Prague, the more I realize that I need to learn more Czech. I want to be able to ask for specific types of rolls at cafes, I want to know what the creepy Czech waiters that hit on me at the cafe today were saying. I want to make witty comebacks.

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.

Czech Word of the Day #225: Familiar, Known

(znah' mee)

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.

Something About Octopi

This is the true account of what I actually believe happened during my wisdom teeth procedure on Thursday, during which I was administered Novocain and laughing gas. I recorded this account promptly after returning home from the oral surgeon. The results of the extraction are four shattered wisdom teeth that are improbably large for a person of my stature, as well as increased proficiency in the Czech language.

I’m sitting in the dentist chair. My head is lowered. The nurse takes my blood pressure. She puts a cup over my nose and tells me to breathe.

“I’m just going to numb the area,” the nurse says. She takes a Q-tip saturated with gel and spreads it onto my gums, behind my molars: First the top right, then the bottom right, then the top left, and the bottom left doesn’t feel like it got any, but maybe it just hasn’t kicked in yet?

The nurse tells me to breathe through my nose, but I don’t feel like I’m getting any air so I breathe through my mouth.

“It’s not going to work unless you breathe through your nose,” says the nurse. “It doesn’t have to be anything dramatic. Just breathe normally.”

I breathe as well as I can through my nose. The nurse puts my headphones into my ears and I scroll to the playlist I made to calm myself during the procedure. I press play. I set my iPod on my chest and settle into dizziness. The doctor comes into the room. “Is it enough? I can turn it up if you want.”

“No, it’s loud enough,” I say. When I realize he was talking about the laughing gas and not the music, I predictably laugh, as one on laughing gas laughs.

They put a jack between my lips and crank my mouth open until it unhinges like a snake’s.

“Just a little pinch,” says the doctor, ticking a needle of exaggerated size into my gum. Coolness washes over the area of injection. My gums feel like they are coated in shellac. The needle is inserted into the back of my palate and Novocain is injected into my brain. I become very sleepy, but I hold my eyes open.
My hands and feet fall asleep against my will and I begin to covertly rotate them. The doctor and the nurse turn their heads towards my feet, and I quickly freeze. They gaze back into my mouth and tell me how great I’m doing. I rotate my numbing feet. They see at the corners of their eyes and turn their heads, but I stop just in time.

The doctor takes out the drill.

“A lot of noise,” he warns me. He pounds it into my shellacked tissue. I feel pressure on my back molar and wonder if they have begun to drill the wrong tooth, but I cannot move or speak to tell them that they have read the x-rays wrong. I wonder what it will be like to chew with missing molars when they have all been removed by accident. The drilling is epic. I will write a story about this. An epic poem. No… a novel.

My body becomes inanimate, but my mind is lively. A sudden movement from the nurse drops my iPod to the ground, and as it hits the tiles it switches into random mode and plays all of the songs that I downloaded for free but didn’t actually enjoy. I mentally sink to my knees as the song mercilessly carries on. I think: “Noooooo…” Then I laugh, and it isn’t because of the laughing gas because I usually laugh at the absurdity of life. In fact, all of the things I have been laughing about are things that I would laugh at in normal circumstances. The doctor and nurse don’t know this and I suppose they are attributing my behavior to the gas. I’m worried that my movements will cause them to make a mistake and possibly exhume more teeth that I require for chewing. Who are these people and why don’t they know how to read a dental x-ray? Shouldn’t these professionals know the difference between an impacted wisdom tooth and a perfectly good molar?

I create a short cartoon depicting my feelings which will later be recorded in my novel as my eyes lull shut. Triceratopses are chomping on vegetables. T-rexes are sinking their teeth into mammals. A snail gets closed into another snail like a Russian nesting doll.

My body is slipping farther away from me and I am certain that I’m going to die. (I always think something is going to kill me; that’s what makes me so charming.) Of course it would be during a simple, routine procedure with a lame anesthetic like laughing gas. If I die now, as obvious as it would be, none of this will be recorded. This alarms me more than my impending doom.

But I’m not going to die after all, because they are now drilling on the other side. Time has skipped ahead with the music that I don’t enjoy.

“Halfway done,” the doctor announces.

“You’re doing great,” says the nurse.

My lips are not wide enough and the doctor puts some device that is usually used to wax automobiles between them to stretch them out forever. They ripple in every direction and my jaw cracks in half.

So I live after all, but what if I don’t remember? It could be like a vivid dream that I forget when I fall back asleep. I think of something about octopi which makes me laugh, and I tell myself to remember the octopi. Remember the octopi.

The doctor puts the drill to the fourth tooth and I begin to moan, but the doctor and nurse are conversing.

“And then he was arrested on the way to the hospital,” says the doctor. I cry out to alert them that area was not numbed properly, but I sound like a baby elephant.

“Can you feel that?” says the nurse.

“She doesn’t like that,” says the doctor.

I suddenly and reluctantly black out. I forget something about octopi. Maybe I’m dying.

But I open my eyes and they are cleaning up. My nose is released from the cup. My torso is elevated by the chair. I’m not listening to music anymore. My iPod has begun to play my Czech language tapes. I laugh, and it is not because of the laughing gas, but the Czech language tapes. To make sure this is understood, I begin to explain that my iPod fell and that random things had been playing throughout the process. My voice sounds muffled and I’m not sure he can understand me. I feel like I’m wearing a retainer.

“It’s not music. It’s Czech language tapes,” I explain. My body is still out of my control, so I rotate my wrists and ankles some more.

“Are you… going on a trip to Czechoslovakia?” he asks.

“Yes, but it isn’t called Czechoslovakia anymore. After it ceased to be a communist state it peacefully divided into the Czech Republic and Slovakia. They’re two separate countries now.”

The doctor has no idea what I’m saying.

The nurse leads me into another room and gets me some apple juice and a glorified ibuprofen.