My address book

I was never very good at keeping an address book.  The best I seem to be able to do is a little notebook that began as a proper directory of the names and contact information of the people I loved, but which was gradually stuffed up with messy slips of  pastel-colored paper, post-it note scribbles of some dear friend's phone number or some family member's address.  For our honeymoon, I knew I would want to send postcards, and so I stood in my mother's living room and copied from her large and orderly address book all those names and numbers by hand, address after address on a single sheet of college-ruled paper that is still folded up, yellowing, crumb-infested, and buried somewhere in my purse (I find it every once in awhile and, for some inexplicable reason, feel like it would be best just to fold it right back up and put it right back into the tiny pocket from where it came).

I'm just not sure why I can't keep it together.  Perhaps it really is the dependence on technology.  Address books have gone the way of memorizing telephone numbers in the last few years...why bother when you can find just about anything you need in life's little tech gadgets? (Facebook has everybody!  Just, right there!  Their birthdays included!)  I think it's more that I'm just a scatter brain who's bad at the orderly details of life (and I am). Either way, it's a shame.  My little address book is quite pretty, and there's something romantic about having a complete one that you could just stick in your baggage when you leave for vacation or move, a connection to all the people you love at once that doesn't depend on phone calls or text messages.  Ah well.  I suppose it will continue to be a good little paper weight, colorful and sweet-looking.  And I do still need a few of those little slips of paper stuck in its pages...even if it's not the neatest way to keep things, I always know where they are!

Halloween

After three years in Philadelphia and much chatter about going, H and I finally ventured to the carnival-esque Terror Behind the Walls phenomenon at the Eastern State Penitentiary this Wednesday.  We live within an easy walk to the site, and we've never even been there in the light of day, let alone at night, so it was definitely due.  It was more of a raucous good time than the terrifying thrill that the site's FAQs promised, and H complained that they should have let only a few people in at a time, leaving us to wander the cell blocks alone. How scary, after all, can something be when you're filing through it shoulder to shoulder like school children filing to the bathroom?  We gave it an A for effort and theatrics though, and I was glad we went.

I never considered Halloween a favorite holiday of mine until recently.  When I was seven years old, my parents, innocently nurturing my love of classic American musicals, brought home Little Shop of Horrors from the video store, and popped it into our VCR without a second thought.  I remember very vividly hiding under a giant pink and yellow flowered blanket with my then best friend Amber as we watched, giggling and screeching.  At the time it seemed like innocent fun.  But, as I'm sure we can all testify, fun and games when we're with other people can turn into dark rooms and creepy basements when we're alone, warping in our little imaginations to fanged funhouse jaws that are ready to eat up our souls whole.  To a seven year old, this is especially true.  I spent the next two years of my life terrified that we had an actual man-eating plant in my basement.  Nightmares aplenty, I would run frantically up the steps whenever I had to be down there, absolutely sure that there was a green tentacle following behind me, ready to wrap its rubbery slime around my skin and yank me back into the abyss.  I think the trauma of such associations (and, weird movie as it is to be afraid of, there WAS trauma) led me to firmly believe that I was a terribly easy scare, and I steered myself away from horror movies, haunted houses, and Stephen King novels for years after.  It's a shame, because, as I've been gradually discovering as an adult, I actually really like these things.  Ah well.  Better a late bloomer than never - there will be plenty more Halloweens to profit from in the coming years, and plenty of quiet nights just waiting for a good horror movie.  Just maybe none featuring giant, flesh-eating plants.  

Neighbors

Our apartment, tucked away as it is, has thin walls and close neighbors.  We've gotten knocks on our door from time to time, asking us politely but firmly to quiet down , and we've probably heard a bit more of our neighbor's lives unfolding than they would care to imagine (erotic moans and sob-filled conversations among them). Our immediate neighbors (the apartment just across from us), though, a really nice young couple that we got to know fairly well, were pregnant this summer, and searching frantically for a house and a more settled life than the city could offer them.  They moved out in a hurry.  The door remains open, and we've ventured in a few times, comparing our kitchen appliances to theirs (they have a newer dishwasher!), and the shade of bathtub (both a 1970s thick yellow that would probably symbolize death in some very thin and very dark avant-guard novel).  It's strange to hear the echo of our own movements ricocheting around the vacant, hard spaces, as we climb the steps and unlock the door to our home.  We chatter sometimes about who might end up in that apartment.  Noisy college students (our apartment has its fair share)?  A nice young couple ?  An older widow, moving back into the city for the convenience?  My husband saw our landlord showing the place to a man with a baby a couple of weeks ago, and came home a bit kerfuffled.  What if they move in and the baby cries all the time?  We'll hear everything.  A family can't live in that place!  It's too small!  I smiled sheepishly, and responded  Better than beer-pong at 3 in the morning.  And with that I realized that my college days are really over - I now prefer the company of calm, family folks over crazy drinkers who are stirring up shenanigans at all hours.  I can see myself marching out to the hall in my bathrobe, swearing and scowling, and asking them with a curmudgeonly squint Do you know what time it is?  

For now, we have no news one way or the other about the vacant apartment, and having the hallway space to ourselves has been really nice, echos or no.  I'm sure our own place will feel just a little bit more cramped when new neighbors do arrive, whoever they are.  I just hope they're as nice as our last ones.

The little microwave that could

Our little microwave has been with me since my first year in college - my father presented it as the perfect going-away present for a dorm room-bound university newbie, and it got plenty of use as the agent for late-night popcorn munchies, hot cocoa on cold winter nights, and the infamous ramen noodles that remain a staple for college kids looking for a quick, cheap meal.  The little white microwave followed me obediently to graduate school, and then to Philadelphia - working maybe a little slower than some of the new-fangled machines out there, but still good enough for us.  

Lately, though, it's been a bit more of struggle to coax it to work than all the years before.  A couple of weeks ago, the start button stopped working.  We now have to press the little 'automatic' buttons instead to get it to go - baked potato, popcorn, and beverage all have their own buttons, the microwave's  best (normally underestimated) guess at the time it'll take to actually cook a baked potato, pop a bag of popcorn, or heat up a beverage.  This is now the only way we have of turning on our little machine.   And these timers, of course, are often not exactly the time we need, and so we have to stand, twiddling our thumbs, and wait to shut off the buzz of the box at just the right time.  As if that weren't enough, a few days ago, the stop button seems to have picked up a little bit of an eccentricity that would be charming if it weren't for the questionable health effects - it now only works when the microwave is off.  In other words, we can clear the old timer with it to start a new timer, but we can't seem to actually stop the microwave with it.  Which means that we just have to open the door to stop the microwave while it's running.  We can only hope that those little nuke waves aren't going to come back to haunt us later with bodily manifestations I'm much too sqeemish to even mention here.  

My sister once lived for two years without a microwave, and I'm starting to picture us in such a state...panicking as I cradle my tepid tea in an  apartment growing colder by the day.  If our plans pan out, we'll only be here for a few short months yet...a year, at most!  I'm fighting for my old, dirty, underdog microwave to hang on for dear life until the last days of Philly.  That's all we need.  It's lasted me this long, surely another few months isn't too much to ask!

The diner

For the past 5 or so days, I have been sick.  I enjoy a work day away from the office every now and then, but I have a threshold, and yesterday, I took one look at the daytime talkshow blaring on the television, the piles of tissues, the used tea bags and my bulgy bathrobe, covering up a sweat shirt and flannel pants (it's cold here), and shot straight through that threshold over into if I don't get out of the house I'm going to kill myself kind of territory.  After he got home and saw my state, my sweet husband bundled me up, ushered me out into the cold, and took me to a warm, inviting little diner.  Just what I needed.  As we got settled and ordered drinks, I chuckled, and leaned over to H -- we were just about the only people in the restaurant under the age of 65 (the building the diner was snugly pushed under, we realized, must be a haven for retired folk). With my voice breaking between a whisper and a low, weak rumble, we didn't say much to each other the whole meal, and when we did, H had to ask a few times what I had said; I ordered the split pea soup with an egg sandwich and carefully crumbled the cracker packets into my dinner. Yes indeed.  We fit right in.  It was actually a very pleasant time.  And, who knows, maybe, 60 years from now, it'll be our daily routine.

Speaking of overheard conversations

I rode the bus several months ago with a couple of school girls who sat across from me, and I found myself unable to concentrate on my book due to their slightly loud conversation.  (In other words- I also really enjoyed eavesdropping to their crazy stories, and put my book down all too willingly).  One was tall and thin with a bushel of blonde curly hair that she couldn't keep her fingers out of.  Her legs seemed very white to me.  She did most of the talking.  The other, with short hair pulled back in a tight ponytail, had retro black glasses on, a dark green army-style backpack, and sat most of the time with her hands in her lap.  Both were wearing Catholic school-girl skirts.   They apparently went to the same high school, but the awkward conversation that ensued clearly indicated that they were neither friends,= nor hung in similar crowds...this was my assumption after hearing the hands-in-lap girl preface everything she said with "I'm a big dork, but..." (which I read as - I'm incredibly self-conscious around you, and don't know quite how much I should reveal about myself to you...). She also said at one point "I guess everyone in school thinks we're pretty weird...", and with that, the blond, leggy one rebuttaled with avoidance, tinged slightly with meanness: "Everyone in school knows who you are.  You and Kelly.  You guys are always together.  Are you guys going to the same college?  Everybody knows who you are."  (which I read as -  Yes.  Everyone thinks you're incredibly weird.  Partly because you're always together.  What are you, like, a couple or something? And everyone, in turn, talks about your weirdness and your too-close relationship with Kelly with everyone else.)  Kind of sad.  

The piece of their conversation I found the most funny was when the hands-in-lap girl said that she wanted to be a photo-journalist for National Geographic.  Leggy blond replied right away "Me TOO!  Oh my gosh!  We have the same ambitions!"  They then promptly agreed that they would just DIE if they had to work a regular, 9-5 day job.  I had to smile a little bit - I probably said similar things in high school too.  Little do you know when you're younger...a 9-5 actually isn't the worst thing in the world.  Your own time is yours, and you get to come home to a warm house and a home-cooked meal, rather than a hotel in...well, if you work for NG, it could be in any wayward corner.  But, I suppose I won't knock them too hard. Those are the types of big dreams you're supposed to have when you're looking at your whole life spread out in front of you.

i-don't-pod

I have a very shameful confession to make: I have no i-pod.  No mp3 player.  I don't know how that happened, but the recent music headphone technology has passed me by.  H even bought an i-pod two (three?) years ago, and it's been collecting dust on his dresser when he's not using it, full of some of my very own music.  I listen to the radio, or to cd's in the car, and to nothing when I'm walking.  I have to put up with the horrible college rock they play at my gym (if I hear that Taylor Swift song "You belong with me" one more time...), and I read novels on the bus.  I sometimes wander online to the old last.fm radio at work when I'm doing something mindless, too, a little treat for myself.  (I have a little, secret piece of paper where I'll scribble down notes about which bands I like periodically, hidden just enough to hide its true purpose under my pencil holder.)  When I listen to podcasts I either sit at my computer and surf the net or play some old-fashioned game like tetris or solitaire, or I perch the speakers somewhere nearby while I do mundane housework, like prepare a meal or unload the dishwasher.  It's true, I get an overdose of what's actually around me much too much of the time, including strange half-conversations that people have into their cell phones (one of the best: "Pickles??  Pickles!! Pickles!  Yes!!"), real conversations that people have in person (one of the most intriguing: "So, apparently her dad is worried about her, like, not being taken care of after the wedding, so he pulls David aside and offers him $10,000, just like that...") , and, every now and then, very intense conversations people have with themselves ("The devil's gonna get us all!  Yes he will!"...err...maybe that one was actually directed at me...).  

The funny thing is, I'm totally unopposed to using that spare i-pod most of the time.  (I really do hate that Taylor Swift song.  And "Who got the hootch", which has been known to play every so often, too...oh god.  Don't get me started on that one).  It's mostly just that I'm not in the habit of grabbing it or thinking about it.  Maybe, after writing about it, it'll cross my mind more as a possible accessory.  In the meantime, bring it on, Philadelphia.  I suppose I can take it.  

Shredder

We bought a brand new shredder recently. (It's funny, the sounds in that word are so fitting for what it does...its low hum when you turn it on, like breath between the teeth, its crackling that punches the air like a consonant.) It was the cheapest one on the shelf (we aren't really people to spend a lot on electronics), but it's still sleek in its simplicity, black and silver with the product name written in a sans serif, all caps font, angular and sparse, to remind you that the future is here, man, and that future is sitting next to your Macbook and ready to erase your former, paper-bound identity about four sheets at a time, staples included. We started with old bank statements, old checkbooks, bank cards that were expiring, but I've since gone a bit shredder-happy. Old student papers from when I taught? Let's just see how she handles these. Printed-out e-mails? Not so confidential? They're e-mails, still: Give her a go at 'em. The bibliography of some research article from graduate school? So what if it's not personal. Let her rip. Scrap paper with tiny doodles in the corner? Better not risk it...turn her on and watch her go. Not sure what happened to my sensible head and my determination to save any paper that might be used again, that I could give new life to by writing or printing on the back of. The whirl of those teeth is just calling a bit too loudly.

A hip evening

H and I ventured out into serious hipster-artist territory this weekend (skinny jeans, colored cowboy boots, funky belts and carelessly-flung scarves all made appearances) for a gallery opening in center city at Vox Populi (an 'artist collective' which is, as explained to me, a non-profit to which artists can pay a small monthly fee in return for a membership and a chance to exhibit their work). There we wandered the old loft spaces with squinted gazes, sliding over hardwood floors slowly, trying not to jostle the transparent plastic cups filled to the brim with cheap wine. We stopped every now and then to take a closer look, or to duck behind a black curtain for a constantly-running video, or to try and figure out how something was rigged up. There was a black and white film depicting a herd of horses running around ordinary household objects...the rim of a sink, the top of a radiator -- it was in a dark little corner with giant foam blocks to sit on. My favorite exhibit was an amazing, 8-foot-high wall of clothes that acted like a damn for a huge, messy pile of more clothes (by artist Derick Melander). White ones, on the floor, to light colors, to darker, then to black at the top. There were just so many clothes, it was a bit astounding to look at for that purpose alone. (Makes you wonder how big a wall you could build out of your own clothes....I suppose I don't want to know.) And they were stacked so neatly, we questioned whether they weren't rigged around cardboard or something. They might have been pinned, but we came away pretty sure they were only anchored on top of clothes and more clothes.

I love art openings. My friends and I used to go to just about any we could in college, and I have to admit, I go just as much for the chance snatches of conversation, the cheap alcohol that makes your cheeks burn and your head buzz around angular objects and interesting colors, the little cheese bits and fruit plates that they put out to munch on, than I do for the real art. It's nice, though, to have such a festive, party atmosphere that's centered around something bigger than just the socializing. To be able to wander alone without feeling like you're being antisocial (and, hey, you always have an excuse to leave a boring conversation -- I actually haven't seen that gallery yet. Let me just sneak away, I'll catch up with you later.) To be able to challenge yourself just to the edge of your comfort level with something slightly grotesque, and then come back to the warmth of friends and conversation. We didn't know many people there, but the people we did know were friendly and open. It was a really lovely evening. It always is.