So much has changed in the last year – almost all of my circumstances, and a good bit of my own personality, if that’s the right word to use. Well, I’m still a bit strange and I still use humor too often and too ineloquently, I am still reserved and a touch too sensitive. I still cannot dance to save my own life, still somewhat more comfortable than is appropriate. But I’m also more likely to speak in a group than before, to initiate conversations. I am able to dance much more freely if not well in public, I now trust myself to handle life’s business, and I feel immeasurably more confident in my own appearance. My hair, my skin and posture I believe are much improved from the state they were in just ten months previous.

The major physical change to my circumstances is the big move I made – fromFloridatoNew York.

You’ll remember that I was looking into various AmeriCorps positions last summer – social service work, stipends, sometimes inclusive of housing as well, and with less experience than a normal job requires. I specifically was looking outside of Miami, outside of the whole of Florida because I had wanted to move away. I have hated Miami for a very long time, almost as long as I lived there, though it became even worse when we moved away from the beach and more inland. I was bored. I could walk nowhere and my driving was – remains – abysmal, though neither I nor my family had the money for an extra car in any case. I never was able to feel as though I fit in that city; not with my shyness, which was crippling, not with my jeans and cardigan instead of shorts, skirts, dresses. My eternal sneakers and tennis shoes instead of cute sandals and heels.

It is a little funny, that the appearance and style I was lacking inMiami– the things that left me out in the figurative cold rather by myself – I have gained them all living a thousand miles away, where it’s none of it necessary anymore. I could probably go back, really, and be comfortable – get a decent paying job, an apartment by the beach for what it costs to live in an outer borough here. I could meet people this time, walk around freely looking good and knowing it too, swimming in the beach and dancing in the clubs. It would be so much easier now, and yet the desire is not there; I think about Miami and all I can recall is how I felt all those years – waiting in the sweltering heat for a bus that would take half an hour more to arrive, dismissed by everyone around me, belittled by my family and dreaming about getting away.

And of course it’s not just an avoidance of Miami that makes me love New York City. It’s such a unique place; I don’t imagine I could achieve this level of contentedness anywhere else. By and large it feels like a Northeast city. I remember the first time I went to Baltimore, to DC, and how I loved the brick, the little houses with tiny front porches, the gray of the side-walks and the look of the city set on rolling hills. I know I’m not describing this very well, because honestly I don’t believe I am able to explain it fully; I simply like the aesthetic of an urban neighborhood in this region. Dense, staid, old.

When I get near my apartment and glance up at the building to check on my window, see the park across the street with its side-walk benches, the busy road a block down with a thousand dollar stores and cheap pizza shops – it makes me feel content. On the train I stand by the door and stare out at the landscape of theBronxfrom the windows; a setting sun, smoke, warehouses and little stores, big brick apartment buildings and wild-flowered, abandoned lots, people going about their business on the weed-cracked side-walks below. In the distance sometimes, the skyscrapers of Manhattan looking serious and gray.

The subway – that’s another thing I love, rather predictably given my lack of driving skills or car. It’s still strikes me sometimes, the care-free simplicity of simply wandering to the bus stop at whatever time with the assumption that transportation will arrive within the next five or ten minutes. New York public transportation; there’s almost not anything I can really say beyond what’s been said a million times already – it’s the best in the country. It will take you anywhere, or nearly. It’s fairly fast, even with all of the delays – I suppose some might complain about the cost but I’m given an unlimited monthly by my work so that’s no concern of mine. Although, I do often note that the monthly unlimited for transportation inMiamiis about the same price for an abysmal service in return. Even if I knew how to drive I would be loathe abandon the train – where there’s (much less, and less noticeable) traffic, where I can read or listen to music in commute, where there are no worries about whose been drinking or not, where even travelling at two, three, four in the morning I have never been in an empty train and never felt particularly unsafe.

Since I am beginning to be able to recognize when I am going on at length about something which is not especially interesting to anyone else, I’m going to cut myself off here and bring this entry to a close. A lot has certainly changed since last I updated this journal – I moved from a city I hate to one I adore, I got a new job, I met many new people. Hopefully this time I’ll be a diligent enough blogger that I get to actually write about it all.

The sad thing is, the material isn’t uninteresting – not at all! What could be better than a class, which I practically hand-picked, about suicide, relationships, and depression? That is the stuff life is made of!! And yet, I slack. I suspect that in the end, I’m just not an academic person – that’s not where my heart is (which sounds unbelievably corny, but I only mean that some people find all the fulfilment they need in researching, in making a name for themselves in academia, and I just care much more about living comfortably, figuring out this whole relating-to-others thing, and helping others more generally….I don’t have the heart of someone who was ever going to be great, even if that’s what I was raised to desire, and I’m finally starting to realize/come to terms with that).

….Meanwhile! I applied to a job which sound absolutely dreamy today – training, pretty good fucking pay by my standards, public service (my desire to work for the state is no secret – I believe good public services are the measure of an advanced society, and the government in general is pretty good about benefits/pay, at least around here), my Very Own Cases, pretty much everything I envision when I allow myself to fantasize about professional future. I probably won’t get it, of course – not being pessimistic, just stating the reality of being a single, inexperienced salesgirl in a city with hundreds of thousands of unemployed workers going after a handful of jobs – but it’s my favorite opportunity that’s popped up so far.

I also used my last ten-dollar-off coupon of the month to buy a dress for my sister’s graduation in a few weeks – the dress is for my sister, of course, not for me. It was sixty dollars originally and I got it down to 12-something, all discounts told – not to bad, though not cheap enough to really excite me. It’s a great dress as well, black but made sunny for its pink-rosy print and it’s a-line skirt. It’s also strapless with a beautiful pleating detail across the bust, so that it looks like the material is merely sitting in front of the breasts instead of lying on them – my sister calls it a “pleated shield” and it pretty much does look like some kind of weird armour. It adds a nice bit of edge to an otherwise completely feminine dress, and once you throw on a cardigan it’s totally work appropriate. Once I get a camera in my hands I’ll probably post a picture or two.

Ok, now I really am going to double up on the studying – I absolutely must have this reaction paper submitted by tonight, no excuses! Out of my way, writer’s block! Fuck off, laziness! Tonight it’s just me and the interpersonal theories of suicidal ideation.

yours,

- Tuesday

Now, I had previously thought I would abandon my department store gig at the first offer of anything in an office, where I can wear non-rubber soled shoes because I get a chair and there would be paper work and computer systems involved. After further reflection (and a minuscule, vaguely insulting raise – I now make *almost* a dollar more than minimum wage, isn’t that nice?) I’ve decided to stay put until I find a job in the actual field I want to enter, which is social/health services. After all, even if I found something in, say, a technological start-up company which was nice enough and paid more than I make right now, I would just keep job searching for the job I really want anyway, and then if I found it I would have to leave pretty soon after accepting, which I don’t like to do. Or maybe my reasoning makes no sense and I’m actually just super lazy. Whatever. This way simplifies things for me and makes me feel more focused.

In the meanwhile, I’ve been taking advantage of said crappy retail job to slowly build up the material trappings of an adult life. Probably from watching too much What Not To Wear, I’ve become much more interested in dressing less like a fourteen-year old and more like an adult. Until very recently I didn’t own any clothes at all except jeans and t-shirts, any shoes except sneakers and tennis shoes (and my beloved red Docs), I had a bookbag and a couple of rundown, old purses with missing hooks, zippers and handles.

So I’ve been slowly building a wardrobe which is respectable as well as true to my style – which I’m only just discovering anyway, so the timing is actually pretty good: had I done this earlier I would probably want to throw it all out now anyway. I’ve gotten a couple of nice shirts, a pair of nice, comfortable flats. My most recent acquisitions, which I am proud of to an inappropriate degree:

- A big giant purse, which is nice/adult enough to take to job interviews, work, etc., but also exactly what I wanted personally – big enough to fit my netbook, journal, agenda, wallet, etc., but casual (cotton, mostly) with sea-side colors (white, beige and mostly sunny-day ocean blue – I look at it and want to go swimming) – with a zipper and five different pockets. Came to $5.17 thanks to a sale, a coupon and my employee discount.

- A pencil skirt! Now, I always thought that I hated pencil skirts, because I am rather slim and thus always looking for things which will give the illusion of curves – big fan of a-lines, here – and I always thought that pencil skirts made you look narrow and flat. No thanks, right? Wrong! I loved each skirt I pulled on – I still don’t quite understand it myself, but I think it has something to do with the high waist and the way your hips look when you walk. I went with a dark gray with a black belt which I found in the clearance rack – not too tight or trendy, hits just below the knee, overall guaranteed to be appropriate for almost any job and yet still, I think, quite flattering. Cost after various discounts: $8.39.

I can’t believe I ever hated shopping.

ps: I would have pictures up, but my sister’s camera is dead (well, was killed after a bad fall….accidental cameracide) and my father took his camera with him when he fucked off to wherever, so I am camera-less. If I do get a hold of one I might come back and add pics later, because I really do think blog posts look quite bare without them.

yours,

- Tuesday

The movie, though, was pretty funny and I am not much of a socializer anyway, so I enjoyed myself pretty well anyway. Afterwards M. and R. once more wandered off by themselves and in a valiant attempt not to resent their couply happiness I listened to music and really, really wished anyplace was still open so I could have a drink, any drink, and then flirted with a security guard in a last-ditch attempt to entertain myself/FEEL LOVED confirm my ability to hold a conversation, and then I went home and watched Life and House Hunters International.

So, overall, can I say I have a life? Well, no. But I think I made at least a good-faith effort, right?

So to quickly bring you up to speed; I’m still at the department store, depressingly, I’m basically done with university minus a summer class I’m taking, after which I will graduate immediately,and  my plans for the future are a giant mess though I feel very good at the moment about all the different ways it could go. I’m considering wrapping up my self-imposed dating hold, what with school being over. I’m thinking of maybe staying here in the city rather than, as I had assumed until very very recently, transplanting myself almost halfway across the country to New Jersey and making it somehow work there. I may take some extra classes - maybe go for a graduate certificate – because my GPA certainly suffered this last year what with the working and the class overload and the personal stress. But all of that will be detailed later.

Today I’m running errands. Because I have free time for the first time in, no joke, a year at least. It’s amazing how much you can actually get done when you don’t have four or five different projects hanging ominously over your head. So I am: returning library books, using a coupon I have to buy a graduation present for my sister, sending my transcript out to an internship in Baltimore, returning a fairly hideous bag, stepping into a pretty store I discovered the other day to just window shop a little, picking up some food for the budgies – in other words, being normal and enjoying myself.

More later!

yours anonymously,

- Tuesday

Actually, it’s nothing major so far, just a series of common, minor, irritating conditions: nasal drip through almost all of the winter which thank-god disappeared, occasionally-mortifying angioedema since January, and just recently probable mitral valve prolapse – hence the monitor. Oh, and new asthma. The annoying thing is, all of these are really very minor, but I still freaked out almost every time something new came up and went to a doctor, so I’ve racked up at least a few hundred in bills (I don’t want to count them! Depressing) to basically learn I’m fine over and over. I don’t even get illness-related sympathy, just sort of scolded for overreacting to the occasinal irregular heartbeat/inability to breathe/swollen body part.

…Ok, possibly I had some frustrations about all of this that I was unaware of, but now that I got it all out in rant form we can move on.

I’m skipping class again. A different class than last time, though – this one is relatively easy, but soulsuckingly dull. And attendence is both taken and counts towards the final grade, so I should really resist the (very, very strong) urge to skip but – I’m only human.

Back to the heart moniter for a moment: I’ve never seen, nevermind worn one before. The biggest takeaway is: goddam these things are uncomfortable. The patches that connect the electrodes to the moniter are itchy as hell, but you can’t touch them. Also, the skin that was underneath got completely red and irritable after I, very painfully, ripped them off in the bathroom a few minutes ago.

That was probably the worst part, the second being that it looks a bit weird to walk around with it, even if it’s mostly in your pocket and you have a high collar to hide the electrodes. People definetly had that uncomfortable look they get when they’re trying not to react to someone’s obvious illness. Not too bad, overall, but I still felt a bit weird and so did what I do whenever I feel less-than-stellar, which is, unfortunately, go to the bathroom and ply on the make-up. Maybe not ply, though – just some heavy mascara, a bit of lipstick, a quick powedering. It’s a terrible, vain habit, but I guess I like looking slightly better, and I find the actual application of make-up to be sort of thereuputic. Yes, I know that’s not normal, no, I’m not dealing with it right now.

It really has been a busy day, though. I got up at six in the morning to be the first in line for some bloodwork. This is also the third time I’ve had blood taken out in as many months, which isn’t fun but at least I’ve become totally blase about watching my lifeblood spurt into little glass tubes. After the lab I had just enough time to get a slice of bread and a boiled egg and then off to the University I went.

Except I had to go early to meet up with poor old G and lend her a few bucks because she had literally nothing in her bank account and has to pay for classes. At least I managed to retrieve the minibottles of vodka and gin I had stored in her car, though, and they’re tucked safely away in my bookbag (actually, it probably would have looked extremely sketchy to anyone watching – standing in a corner of a parking lot, I hand over a few bills and G. thursts a small, plain brown paper bag at me, which I then quickly hide away).

Of course, any other day I could have enjoyed a little drink and probably even been good to go to class without wanting to beat my head against the wall till something broke, but today was heart-monitering day and I could not have a sip (well, I probably could have, but a single sip of alcohol seems wasteful and weird).

Also, for lunch I had a packet of vanilla waifers and a bar of Dove Smooth Milk Chocolate, which finally tastes good again after I OD’d on it last year. My stomach is not happy but I’m feeling okay.

I’m on the hunt for a job right now – almost any job will do, really – and it’s actually going surprisingly well. Apparently previous experience makes a difference, because I’ve only filled out about five applications and have gotten two interview calls already. Last year, before my stint at the bookstore, I must have turned in about thirty applications and only Nordstrom ever wanted an interview – and those bastards sure as hell didn’t hire me (although they were super nice about it, sent me a real, honest to god mailed paper letter to reject me by). But I have a good feeling this time – soon I will join the ranks of the partly employed!

In Bad Economy Stories I Can Relate To news, our house is being totally foreclosed on. Bummer! To add to the general dismalness of that situation, my dad finally left/got kicked out (??) of the house, so it’s just us womenfolk now. Hence the new-found need for another money source, since my father’s taken his (significantly larger than my mother’s) income and disappeared. Well, not exactly disappeared – he’s moved into, I assume, an apartment somewhere, won’t tell any of us where, and appears sporadically to help out around the house, “visit”, or give us fucking useless bits of money – fifteen dollars for me last time he was here, which I took even though it’s kind of insulting because I need it anyway. So it’s a weird situation.

But actually all of this might be a step in the right direction. My parent’s marriage had been dissolving for a while, and neither were willing to budge to fix it, so this has been coming for a long time. Sometimes separation is the best option – although I sort of wish, that if it had to happen anyway, it had happened a lot sooner – my dad will be alright, he had money, a mistress, plenty of friends from happy hour at the bars, so, whatevs.

My mother’s situation is much more troubling — she makes twenty-five thousand a year, had very few friends, is frankly not getting any younger, and now she has to navigate a new, single life. She doesn’t have as many friends – her work isn’t that conducive to close-friendship-making – and I seriously worry about her being alone for the rest of her life. She could eventually date again, I suppose, but it’s just complicated – where do you meet a good guy, over fifty, when you don’t go out much, are shy, and there’s somewhat of a language barrier (Spanish is her primary language)? Match.com? It’s depressing.

So all of that – worrying about what Mom’s going to be doing with her days now that she’s alone, worrying about her financial situation – is why I’m seriously feeling the pressure to never leave home, even though we don’t really get along and I am miserable here. I will, though, leave home, because at some point I have to start my own life, right? I mean, I’ve put that off already until I’m nearly twenty-two (next summer, when I graduate college) – my mom wants me to then get a full time job and we would live together in a nice place indefinitely. I want to leave. I want to go very far, far away, where I can relax and go out and drink and have sex and have fun without the stress that seems inherent to being here.

To add to the confusion, I’ve recently become very, very interested in Americorps – honestly it sounds like a program that was made for me (with a few tweaks here and there). I would love to go and commit for a year of service – the only problem is mom, again. We don’t get along but she’s my mother and alone now, so I feel a pretty strong sense of commitment and duty to her, too – which is why, although I had planned on leaving after graduating, I had also planned on continuing to pay my part of the rent after moving – Americorps does not pay enough for me to be able to send anything back regularly, though. Not even close. I’m keeping it as an option but I have to really think about how to work this financial problem.

This has been a very long update. Possibly I got a little nervous there as the coffee (a tall white chocolate mocha with whipped cream & chocolate syrup – order it, it’s delicious) began to kick in. So, until next time,

regards,

Tuesday

Yeah, now I’m sitting here trying to remember what we did on Wednesday, or separate the events of Tuesday from the events of Wednesday from the events of Thursday, and failing rather miserably.*

Either way, at some point, let’s say Wednesday, we made our way over to the large supermarket chain store nearby. We did this with Z. because he has a car and it would have been too far to walk comfortably. And now I’m certain that this was on Wednesday, because I remember the weirdness of  Z coming over to pick us up, and because we are useless girly stereotypes we weren’t ready for another twenty minutes because we were running around putting on make up and shit.

Eventually we did make it to the supermarket. Not much notable there, except that we spent almost eighty dollars, which was painful and actually traumatizing for me, but a necessity due to my sister having NOTHING in her fridge or cabinets. So now we were a lot more broke but we had enough food. Which is always a sign that you’ve got at least some of your shit together, and it makes me feel better to open the cabinets and have some options. Food: worth it.

DAY THREE, THURSDAY

I am drawing such a blank for this day. I mean, I want to say that we cleaned some more, and then made our way…somewhere? Went outside at some point? Did we see Z? I can’t remember anything. I mean, I like to think this is when we bought some olive oil for me to make my OCM potion, but I couldn’t tell you for sure. Possibly. If so, we must have also bought the V8 fusion juice, in an attempt to get healthy without actually engaging in health behavior like eating fruit/vegetables, and I suppose did a variety of other things which make for a really, really boring weblog entry. Can you tell how exciting and cool we are? But actually, the entire point of me being here is to help my sister finish school by taking over all of the housework and a helping to oversee the moving process (which has changed now from moving to finding someone to room with her and cover half the rent).

So we are not supposed to be having fun, so much. We are supposed to be working; though as a side-note I think that night we also stayed up too late watching crappy clips of trash online, or possibly a horrible movie, so we failed at both avoiding fun and working.

* I want to say that soon, I will be blogging events with a little more immediacy to avoid these blanks and sort of dragging narrative, but I won’t promise that because promises  seem to be life’s cue sweep in and fuck around with you. But that’s my intention for the near future, in any case.

As I type this (hopefully the night before I publish it! I am slow) it is day six of my super!fun baltimore adventure trip, wherein I hang out inside my sister’s stuffy apartment all day and help her move and clean and cook. Woot-woot. But really it is a lot of fun, because my life generally consists of hanging inside my house all day and being forced to clean (not so much cook, I guess, but that’s a negative because I really do like cooking! My mother just believes that I waste the food by ruining it, and she’s not wrongbut that means Tuesday is not much allowed in the kitchen back home). Since my sister is, I gather, rather accustomed to eating microwaved oatmeal and expensive coffee for breakfast, lunch and dinner she’ll take my macaroni and pre-packaged microwaved chicken and like it, though, which is nice.

Am currently chilling (not literally; summer has finally arrived in Baltimore and it’s hot enough that we can turn off the air conditioners and still sweat at night – this is a positive, in my opinion) at my sister’s boyfriend’s place, probably because it is much nicer than our own – larger and sort of almost high end looking, with its sleek floors and open kitchen and stainless steel appliances. I won’t say anymore about the apartment because a full description could easily swallow this entire post, but just trust it is awesome.

To discuss Y’s boyfriend a little – we will call him Z. – because he is probably going to be around a lot, he is a bit different from her usual aesthetic - very blond, very blue-eyed, very mature and together. I give him an A-. Excellent boyfriend material, possibly not as hot – very attractive certainly  but not, I don’t think, in that blood-boil-ooh-dangerous sort of way that really, really gets you hot. Which is, you know, probably what makes him excellent boyfriend material in the first place. He has, like, a stable job/personality and knows what’s going on with his life. It’s very strange and makes me feel rather young.

So, we’re at his place and the two of them are in his room being very, very quiet – ostensibly because they are studying so very studiously, but I can’t help but imagine they’re actually making out like mad, which is a little awkward for me but hey. Actually if I find they’re not making out like mad I’ll be a little concerned, like; why in the world not?? So you crept into his room and then watched him studied very quietly for real??? But enough about my sister making out with people, since I suppose that’s the sort of conversation that makes people uncomfortable.

Six days of Baltimore, passing by very slowly, I feel. Which is a good thing! Let me see if I can recount the trip:

DAY ONE (TUESDAY)

I arrived in Baltimore after my boring airport experience that I managed to write an ridiculous amount about regardless. I thought we would be taking the train back to the city from the airport, but my sister and Z. showed up in his car to pick me up. Miles more convenient and inexpensive? Yes, but I couldn’t help being a little disappointed – I love trains, even commuter ones, because we don’t really have them back home (also on the list of realistically boring things I find exciting: subways, brick, porches).

Saw Y’s apartment for the first time: beyond cool, in a very strange way, because my sister has a very sort of hipster, northeast, artsy vibe and her roommate was a west coast vegan hippy. The decor was…confused, in a good way, although apparently neither of them had taken to cleaning the way you should if you can’t afford a maid, so it was a horrible mess. Enough so that our dialogue as we entered went something like,

Me: Oh wow! This is so awesome! This place is great!

Y: Really? I guess it’s okay. It’s just normal.

Me: No, it’s really cool! Oh, look hardwood floors. What’s that smell??

Y: Smell?

Me: Yeah, as soon as you come in. Is that laundry?

Y: I don’t smell anything

Me: It’s sort of horrible. Is that from the kitchen? What the fuck?

Y: Why does everyone who comes in say there’s a smell??

The smell turned out to be emanating from a mystery!substance in a bowl in the dishwasher, which was fully overflowing with dishes. After I tackled the kitchen – which I want to reiterate was disgusting – with a pair of yellow rubber gloves and a bottle of disinfectant the smell disappeared, and there was much rejoicing, mostly with a chinese delivery indulgence – fifteen dollars gone immediately! – but the food (fried rice, thankfully without an excessive amount of vegetables for once, bourbon chicken, these crabmeat pies for my sister and ridiculous chinese “donuts” (read: dough, rolled into balls, fried, and then haphazardly covered in sugar) ) was delicious, insane, we weren’t even able to talk we were inhaling that shit so desperately. I want to say we were watching part of a movie throughout, but I couldn’t tell you because my eyes were unable to leave my plate even once. Possibly we were also just hungry.

Then we stayed up until around 1 am watching internet clips of random trash. Nothing much got done the first day.

~~+~*~~****~~++~~**~

“I am currently at the gate waiting for my plane to BALTIMORE whooo-yeah!! So, at this point you may be saying out loud to your computer screen, “Tuesday, this trip is getting a little redundant. It’s hardly the first time you visit Baltimore, and I’d thank you to get a hold of your fake enthusiasm, please.” Well, that shows how much youknow, because I’m actually inordinately, inappropriately excited! Yeah! Baltimore! Totally!

 OK, to be fair a large part of that is just being away from the towering, crazystrict presence of parents who don’t make any particular distinction between twenty and thirteen years of age (not, mind you, that I feel it’s worth moving out and like, paying rent to someone, especially when I have no steady income. Life is all about figuring out your priorities, and one of my big ones is to live comfortably, as much as that’s possible. Marry up*!).

 So I’m waiting for my plane to come. It only took me, oh, twenty minutes to attract the weirdos (ok, to be fair I have taken planes, buses and so on before without attracting any weirdos at all, so I guess I’m not going to go on a whiny rant about my (probably nonexistent) ability to attract weirdos. But let’s just say that I’m very delicate looking, very thin and sinewy but rather plain looking, in terms of attractiveness, and that combination (of seeming defenselessness coupled with possible self-esteem issues) attracts a lot of weirdos a certain kind of guy. Let’s just say before I decided to Not Date the inquirers weren’t exactly Prince Charming.

So, anyway, I have just set up my laptop when a guy, a bit overweight, late thirties to late forties (can you tell I’m terrible at guessing ages?), Haitian with the heavy accent to go along, sits across from me. No problem so far. I call up my dad to ask a question, and when I hang up HaitianDude leans over and asks to borrow my cellphone.

Now, sometimes I am rather paranoid, I can admit that pretty readily. So I hesitate to answer because I am having visions of him starting to dial and then making a run for it across the airport – which I will admit makes not much sense since he’d probably be tackled by security before you can say “Hey!” But paranoia isn’t supposed to make sense, so moving on I asked first if he was calling out of state or…? No, no, he assures me, not out of state. When I ask which area code (I realize this is a bit much, but after all I wouldn’t mind answering these questions were I the one asking to use some stranger’s very expensive, new looking razor cellphone), he explains, eventually, that he’s calling Haiti. To which I said, “Oh, it’s out of country. Yes, that’s much better.” Except the much-better part was in my head. So at this point I’m about to give up the phone, despite not being very comfortable, and I ask (yes, I was full of questions, I’m a very irritating person and you probably wouldn’t want to borrow a phone from me, because I am weird about things like that) about how long he would need: five minutes, he says.

Now maybe I’m just a terrible conversationalist (maybe, ha) but this seems like an awfully long time to be on the phone. Like, that’s a whole conversation with your lawyer or dad or something, not a quick check with someone like I assumed – I mean, I was a bit taken aback because I was assuming he’d say something like “thirty seconds” or “a minute”. At this point I start hemming and hawing some more, and then Guy very nicely guesses that I really don’t want to give up the phone and says “You can say no.”

So I say, “Yeah, sorry.” And smile all apologetically and go very quickly back to my ipod and laptop, because I have the strong sensation I have been a total bitch – which frankly I don’t mind being to someone I won’t ever see again. They’ll just be like “yeah, I ran into this real bitch at the airport” and that’s the end of that. So I put on my bitch persona, complete with headphones to block out further conversation.

 All that does not make him a weirdo, frankly it makes me a bit of a weirdo, if anything. But later, when he sits right up next to me and touches my arm and says, literally, “Do you know Jesus loves you”? Yeah, that’s when he makes my weirdo list. Will now retire the word “weirdo” from this post, btw.

 I say “Yes, I know.”

And he says “Do you?”

And I was like, “Yeah, really. I really, really, know. I am Christian.” And I was tempted to fish something Catholic-y from my bag but refrained in case he would then attempt to convert me to his particular denomination. And this conversation goes on for a goddam while, too – Jesus is great, Jesus loves you, give yourself over to Jesus, yes I agree, yes I have, and so on – and maybe I would have put an end to it a bit more abruptly were I not still feeling guilty over my non-phone-lending ways. Eventually he wandered off and has accosted (or, okay, from a distance it appears to be normal conversations but you know he’s out there pimping Jesus like nobody’s business) like three people since. Also, this is why Jesus gets such a bad rap – shit representation. Christians! Be cool!

 Other stuff going on around me includes: everyone has Dunkin Donuts coffees and bagels, which makes me glad I ate a lot otherwise I’d be wasting money on terrible, overpriced donuts, and there’s the most attractive gay boy sitting in front of me. Well, okay to be fair I have no idea what he looks like from the front, but his hair is so, so beautiful, a kind of layered medium brown that waves perfectly and goes down far enough that I can barely see a bit of pale, pale neck. And he’s wearing a lovely black shirt. He is like a vampire, and totally brings out the middle-school, medium grade lust in me. Yum, such delicate shoulders. I wish he would get on the phone again so I could listen to that beautiful, lilting voice encourage someone to finish their paper. Hmmmm.

*just kidding. No, really. If I end up marrying someone more well-off than myself I’d probably end up all resentful and insecure, like I’m the asshole mechanic husband with an inferiority complex who drinks because his junior partner lawyer wife makes more than he does. It’s just terrible of me! Oh well. A girl’s got to be able to take of herself, always, even when she currently isn’t – as long the capacity to do so is there. You gotta have backup. And so on. This was a pretty long footnote.”

~~~***++*~~~*~+~~~+~~~**~~

I never really ever got around to finishing my bloggings of last year’s trip to Baltimore, but I’m feeling good about my writing prospects this time, because

a) it’s a much longer stay, three weeks and

b) I’m spending a good part of the day doing nothing, so I actually have the time

Until later,

- Tuesday