Milk and Pickles

the holy invasion

2010-09-09T04:54:00.001-07:00

I figured out how to get onto the roof at work and went up there one morning witih a coworker to look at the skyline. We noticed a strange airplane flying low over the city. It seemed to have only one wing. Then we realized it was carrying a large payload that looked like a missile but turned out to be a large cargo helicopter, strapped to its underbelly. When the plane released the helicopter, it hovered over the building next to ours and landed. Dozens of people streamed out of it and spread out over the other building's roof. They figured out how to get over to our roof and started crowding around us, too. They appeared to be college fraternity brothers, all wearing matching tie-dye shirts with Christian slogans. My coworker was worried they were aliens and ran for the door to the stairs. I got the nerve to ask one of them who they were. They claimed to be a service club airlifted in from the east side to protest rising heating bills for all the poor residents of the West Village. There were hundreds of them---I could see helicopters landing on other roofs nearby and letting off even more of these boys. Before I could ask them another question, the helicopter morphed into an all-terrain land vehicle and kind of climbed over onto our roof. The group leader driving the land-helicopter turned on a megaphone and instructed everyone to head inside for a pizza party. I took a different stairwell and ended up at a study party where my friends from high school had apparently been waiting over ten years for me to show up.

creative fundraising

2010-09-07T07:47:00.000-07:00

A group of literary agents decided to take over a struggling elementary school and turn it into a graphic design firm. Things weren't going so well---the kids just weren't producing creative enough work to justify their mission statement of unprecedented creative innovation. And public school just don't get enough funding these days. So they decided to take me hostage and set a price on my head to fund their budget for going after new clients. Things were looking pretty grim. Turns out the government doesn't negotiate with graphic designers. But then I got a phone call from my mother, who informed me she had worked out a deal with the agent teacher designer terrorists to pay off my ransom in monthly installments, like a mortgage. My mom is the best.

republicans make horrible backseat drivers.

2010-08-14T05:13:00.001-07:00

My mom and I were trying to take the subway back to my apartment, but the roof of the platform was leaking steadily no matter where we tried to stand. I was convinced it was acid rain, but before I could get too freaked out our train arrived. At least, it was supposed to be the F train, but the flashing screen on the side said it was the B6 bus. Close enough.

I found a couple of seats for me and my mom, but a young, well-dressed woman with a perfect ponytail and a pearl necklace shoved onto the train in front of my mom and sat down next to me. I said, "Excuse me, but my mother was going to sit there." The women said, "Oh," and didn't move. Luckily there were two more seats on the other side of her, so I just got up and sat down next to my mom. "Thanks for nothing," I said, against my better judgment. The woman proceeded to shriek at me for being a rude bitch for the rest of the ride.

At some point the train/bus morped into a shared car that I was driving. My mom was in the back seat and the horrible woman was sitting up front next to me. She criticized my driving constantly, from not taking a tight enough right turn to not using my turn signal early enough. My mom and I tried to figure out the best route home. The woman interrupted us, saying, "But I'm not going to your house. You have to drop me off at work." I asked her where she worked, and she said, "I work for the Glenn Beck show. That's G-L-E-N-N-" I cut her off and told her I knew who Glenn Beck was.

I was trying not to let her get under my skin, but the road signs were really confusing and I was worried about getting lost. When I tried to get onto a highway ramp that she disapproved of, I accidentally turned onto someone's driveway. She smirked through all the three-point turns I had to make to get us back out. And then she was gone. I'm pretty sure my mom shoved her out of the moving car when I wasn't looking.

doctors and nurses

2010-07-25T09:24:00.000-07:00

I was a doctor working at a hospital, which was an absolute nightmare. I mean, the outbreak of the plague was one thing; they barricaded all the doors and wouldn't let anyone leave so we wouldn't spread the infection. But I also didn't really know how a doctor should behave.

I walked into the cafeteria, full of friends and family members of patients whose moods seemed to range from tired to anxious to visibly distraught. In my mind, being a doctor was kind of like volunteering at a children's day camp or a retirement home, and my job was to go make small talk with all these people and prove to my supervisors that I was making myself useful. But no one wanted to talk. And then the nurses started yelling at me for annoying the visitors.

The nurses kind of ran the place. I kept asking which patient was staying in which room, but the nurses would grab their charts away from me and tell me the information was confidential. I tried to go out into the courtyard for a minute to clear my head, but yet another nurse blocked my way, scolding me for not putting on my coat. So I decided to go fill prescriptions, the one mindless task I knew I could do correctly, and one that would take up several hours of time where I wouldn't have to pretend like I knew what I was doing. But the nurses were having a secret conference in the pharmacy room, trying to decide what to do about the plague, and they shooed me away.

yet another apocalypse

2010-07-18T05:34:00.000-07:00

When the bombing started I was on the road in Nebraska. I stopped in at a bar and watched on TV as the bombs descended on Berlin and London. They fell slow and placid, looking like a swarm of giant fat black jellyfish that turned to bright orange flame when they landed on buildings and public squares. The other people in the bar stared blankly as panicked Europeans ran at and around the screen.

The response across America was hard to gauge. I stayed with friends in Nebraska, a family that lived on a compound in the middle of nowhere. One woman there was worried about her children, who her good-for-nothing ex-husband had shipped off to boarding school in England. She wondered if her children were still alive, if she should begin to mourn. I wondered how her ex managed to afford boarding school on the limited salary of an unemployed alcoholic.

I stopped off in a high-end mall on the way back to New York. The associates at the Nordstroms there seemed more upset about a new competitor who had taken over the bulk of the under-occupied mall at half their rent, drawing away their customers with fancy white pillars and warmly glowing display cases. But that was the result of another catastrophe, well on its way and nearly forgotten by the time this other situation arose.

Back in New York, we carefully moved the tomato plants from the roof into the bathroom, just in case. But I kept going to work. Everyone carried on almost like normal. The TV stopped getting an international feed. The military started up the draft again, but it was only to stop domestic violence, the potential looting and pillaging that one expects when it seems like the world is about to end.

At work I engaged in some emotional looting and pillaging. I'm not proud of it. But for some reason a few of us in the editorial department felt justified in going down to the production department and intimidating their staff. We acted all tough and entitled. We messed up paperwork, drew mustaches on design mock-ups, played around with people's computers. A supervisor came by and asked just what we thought we were doing, and we fled back upstairs, ashamed.

zoo party

2010-04-13T05:03:00.000-07:00

This crazy old rich guy built a private zoo downtown just for whales and dragons. On cleaning day, he had a party. People would sit in the viewing galleries and watch as workers drained the whale pool and scrubbed down the walls of the dragon cages. Then there would be a parade through the city streets as the animals were carted back from their temporary holding facility. For this particular cleaning day party, the guest list included me and everyone I used to date. Everyone got pretty drunk in the viewing gallery, so I popped open one of the windows into the side of the empty whale pool and climbed down inside. It looked like an old city pool, just ten times deeper and so wide I could barely see the other side. The bottom and sides of the pool were lined with light brown tiles and skylights shot down beams of sunlight at random angles. I sat in one corner, breathing in the slightly fishy air, until alarms went off to signal they were going to fill the pool back up and dump the whales back in. I rejoined the party, which had moved up to the roof so everyone could lean over the edges for a glance of the purple and red dragons being carted down Broadway.

not the best day to play hookie

2010-03-29T04:24:00.000-07:00

I skipped work to meet my friends for lunch in the East Village and buy some new soccer cleats. Lunch was great, but unfortunately an alien from an alternate dimension was also shopping for some new cleats. It ripped through the space-time fabric of 9th street on a Tuesday afternoon. All anyone could see anywhere were these giant purplish tentacles, which started grabbing shoes and people who looked like they might be good at soccer (apparently this was also a recruiting trip). Luckily, I'm not such a hot player these days, and I escaped with my shoes and headed over to Troy, Michigan to meet my friend Steve for a drink. He took me to this members-only hipster bar on Big Beaver. No one seemed happy to see me. No one there seemed that happy to see anyone, actually. There was a walk-in clinic next door, so I decided to go get some alien-related injuries checked out while I was there and then head back to work to at least put in an appearance.

the worst

2010-03-23T08:43:00.000-07:00

I was hanging out with my coworker Maureen in a park near an old chemical factory. We were having a great time. The sky was an ominous deep gray, but we weren't too concerned. A group of construction workers were loitering nearby, also enjoying the park, and occasionally making lewd remarks in our direction. We chose to ignore them.

All of a sudden, the construction workers started yelling and pointing at the chemical factory, which appeared to be imploding on itself. Maureen and I stayed where we were. Inexplicably, the men all ran toward the factory to get a closer look. Debris was flying all over the place, and I was sure some of them were bound to get hurt, but they seemed to be just out of the way of danger. That is, except for a large white bucket attached to a freestanding structure next to the rest of the factory. Maureen and I watched in horror as the bucket toppled sideways, falling directly on top of the men and trapping them underneath. We both started screaming and I started running. Then I realized that was not the right response, and headed for a pay phone to call 911.

As I tried to get through, Maureen came running up, screaming, "Oh my god! The chemicals are burning their skin off! We have to do something!" The operator picked up the line and asked for our location, but I drew a blank and just started screaming "At the factory! The old chemical factory!" The whole situation was just totally awful.

really bad day

2010-03-14T14:52:00.000-07:00

My coworker Adrienne and I took a break from work to try out a new bakery down the street from our office. The place was basically someone’s apartment, with all kinds of delicious looking baked goods on display in the kitchen. Before we put in our order, we tried to find a seat on one of the couches in the living room, but it was already filled to capacity with the extended family of a grumpy patriarch with a terminal illness.

The old man’s children appeared to be arguing over his will. He was threatening to disown the whole lot of them and give all his money to some more deserving cause, like the Humane Society or his hot young girlfriend, also present. We decided to get our baked goods to go.

I ordered some strawberry bedtime loaf (a large thick cake intended to be eaten right before you go to bed) and a bear claw. Instead, the pastry chef gave my bear claw to the old man’s angry old wife, who gulped it down in a single bite before demanding to be shown to the bathroom. The chef led her off, tossing me a single plain croissant as he went. It was tasteless and dry. I looked longingly at the cases full of raspberry tarts and brownies and truffles, but it was time to go.

The rain was coming down outside. Adrienne and I opened our umbrellas and parted ways, and I fell into step with a group of super douchey bankers who were comparing the sizes of their recent deals. At some point they decided I was one of them, and the weakest member of their tribe at that, so they started mocking my inadequate dealmaking powers.

It was crazy windy out, and my umbrella almost blew away several times on the way to the parking lot, where my new friends and I had left our fancy banker cars. They all had Porsches and Lamborghinis and Maybachs and whatever other cars bankers drive these days. I had my old Dodge minivan from 1994.

The alpha-asshole of the group pointed at my car and laughed in my face, just as I finally did lose my umbrella. It flew up in the air and landed handle-first on the asshole’s shiny tank-like car, making an unpleasant scratching noise. Whoops. I tried to get in my van, but it was too late. The head jerk was already in his car and heading right for me, steam pouring from his nostrils and ears. He smashed into my van as hard as he could, and I figured that would be it, but he was actually just trying to plow the van out of his way so he could run me over personally.

So I started running, realizing it was one of those days when I just couldn’t win. This guy was going to run me over and then back up over my body until I was nothing but a bloody stain on the pavement. And then he would probably spit on me for getting his tires dirty. He was just that kind of asshole.

i just came for the fjords

2010-03-09T03:43:00.001-08:00

My brother and I went to visit a former coworker of mine who had moved to a small Scandinavian town. Everyone got around on rollerblades, which my brother loved and I found terrifying. I kept plowing into walls whenever we had to stop or go around a corner. Our host took us to a vegan food court, then back to her house for tea.

Her house was full of statues and expensive-looking antique knickknacks. We had tea on uncomfortable couches in the front parlor. Beyond the front parlor, separated from us by a glass wall, was yet another, fancier, back parlor, stuffed with all the antiquities and statuettes that were just too valuable for everyday use.

It was pretty fucking awkward. I don't think I was ever even really friends with this woman---I just wanted an excuse to come to Scandinavia. We ran out of small talk after about five minutes and just sat there pretending to admire all the crap in the room.

Then her younger brother burst in at a sprint, followed by six of his friends, all carrying futuristic hunting rifles. They passed right through the front parlor into the forbidden back parlor and started shooting at birds that had come to roost on the ceiling. The birds swooped down, flying out of the back parlor, through the front parlor, and out the door the brother came in through. The men followed them back out, and my ex-coworker gave us a pained smile as she took another sip of tea.

car + car

2010-03-08T20:07:00.000-08:00

Oh, right. This blog. So my friend Adam and I were walking down Marcy, and instead of the Marcy Playground on our left, there was a big parking lot with a few broken-down old cars rusting miserably, fenced in with barbed wire. Then all of a sudden this VW van driving down the street next to us sprouts wings, bounces over the fence into the parking lot, and leaves a bouquet of roses on the front fender of one of the cars before flying off into the Brooklyn sky. I turned to Adam and said, "If you weren't here, I would have sworn I just dreamt that." He said, "I know, right?"

a rough night

2010-01-10T08:39:00.000-08:00

I thought I was just going to the Y to play some basketball while I was waiting for my laundry to finish, but it turns out they wanted me to be the manager for a new teen pop sensation. I can't tell you his name, for reasons that will soon become obvious.

Part of my job was to monitor his movement around the stage during shows. It was a pretty complicated set up, with hidden harnesses and elevated platforms and various large pieces of moving machinery. I followed him around the stage like a mother hen, carefully keeping out of view of the audience, making sure he didn't accidentally fall to his death and take out a few tweens in the process. We were halfway through the night's performance, in a large warehouse space in rural Florida, packed full of near-hysteric teenage girls and quite a few very enthusiastic teenage boys as well, when it was suddenly revealed to us and to the audience that the pop star and his entire staff (myself included) were actually clones, distant copies of the real pop star and his original entourage.

I didn't really have time to deal with the unhappy implications of this revelation for myself. The tweens were in near revolt, and one of my many duties was crowd control. So I took the mic and said the first thing that came into my head, which was that we were changing the format of that night's show. In half an hour, members of the audience would be given the opportunity to wrestle a clone. Five clones, five matches. I know this was an idiotic idea, but the crowd seemed to like it. They happily filed out of the warehouse to let us reconfigure the space for the impromptu fight night.

Now we were faced with the conundrum of what to do if our pop star was crushed, strangled, or otherwise damaged in the upcoming bouts. Of course, it wasn't actually that much of a problem, seeing as there were apparently additional clones of all of us waiting in reserve. All in all, it was a stressful night all around, and I completely forgot to take my laundry out of the dryer.

idyllic whatever

2009-11-27T05:19:00.000-08:00

I found a neighborhood I'd never heard of before, east of the East Village. Its main feature was a large castle-like structure blocking the entire length of Houston right at the entrance, beyond Avenue D and the FDR overpass. People came from all over the city to look at it. Apparently it was built by a bored and very rich fourteen year old whose parents never let her leave the house. She built the entire castle inside the main room of her parents' mansion. Her parents were so proud of her work that they had it transferred to Houston as a permanent installation. I guess they were rich enough to pay off all the fines for blocking traffic in perpetuity.

The castle itself wasn't that remarkable, aside from the fact that it was in the middle of the street. I was able to walk right up to it and peer through the narrow windows built into the sides. It was hollow inside and full of trash and blankets.

Beyond the castle, the neighborhood felt like a mix of Franklin, Michigan and the Cotswolds. Lots of sloping green fields and adorable houses and a little main street full of antique shops and art galleries. I decided it was my new favorite part of the city. I went there one day with a friend of mine for a summer picnic. Hundreds of people were gathered in one of the big clearings, sitting on the grass and laughing their heads off.

Then my friend started kissing all the girls around us. We got up and walked down the main street holding hands, and at each house a girl came down to the front gate for a kiss while I stood awkwardly to the side. I realized all these women were people I went to high school with who had since married, some of them with kids of their own. I also realized that somehow, probably in a way Freud could explain quite nicely, all of the above means I am totally psyched out by the prospect of my impending high school reunion.

team spirit

2009-11-22T07:15:00.000-08:00

I moved to an island off the coast of New Zealand to coach the locals in a sport I had invented. It was kind of a combination of ultimate frisbee and volleyball. I called it racquetball.

When I arrived on the island, there was nothing there but a goat and some carrots. My assistant coaches and I managed to live off the land for many years until we eventually cozied up to the native population. We found them, conveniently, in a large gymnasium inside a sporting goods store. I picked up my racquetball equipment (a soft frisbee-like disc) at the front of the store, fighting off several sweaty white guys in tennis clothes and headbands. Then I gathered some local kids and showed them the rules.

We got a pretty good game going in the gym. Kids were swarming out of the woodwork to join the team. Then all of a sudden all the kids cleared off the court except for my original five players. Thousands of people crowded around, packing the bleachers and spilling over onto the sidelines. Six very large local men sauntered onto the opposite side of the net and challenged us to a match. I gave my team a pep talk. We were ready for our big debut. But then the men pulled out a volleyball and my kids panicked. I called a time out and we removed ourselves to the hallway.

"We can do this," I told the kids.

"No we can't."

"Yes you can."

After a few minutes of this, we decided to play the game after all. We'd do one set of volleyball followed by a set of racquetball. The overall winner would banish the other group from the gym forever. The stakes were high, but my team was ready. I was doing the Peace Corps proud.

kill your editor

2009-11-20T06:57:00.000-08:00

Corporate capital punishment had been reinstated, although in the book publishing business it was mainly used by authors who were unhappy with the way their editors handled their books. I had the unfortunate luck of having two separate authors sentence me to death at the same time. The authors in question did not believe in coordinating their plans with others, so my first execution was scheduled for the morning and my second for that same afternoon.

Author #1 was a very successful entrepreneur, and a bit of a showman. He rented out a large public atrium and set up ticket booths. The public was welcome at $20 a pop, but he promised an especially gruesome old-school decapitation for their money. I'd be put up on a platform while someone ran at my neck from behind with an authentic samurai sword. As the crowd began to gather, I snuck out from back stage and began pleading my case with them. I hoped that if they got to know me as a person they would be less willing to let my author go through with the beheading. They pretended they couldn't hear me.

At the last second, author #2 rescued me from the chopping block. His motives may have been somewhat self-interested (he didn't want to have to execute a corpse), but for the moment I was grateful. I was kind of upset that author #2 was going through with this. I thought we had a pretty good relationship. But he was very sensitive, and he claimed I had never paid enough attention to him or called him often enough to talk about his work. I suppose that may have been true. I have been very busy lately.

We discussed all this on the car ride upstate. He had rented out a cabin in the woods for a small private ceremony. Just him and me, the still lake, and some geese who would flap up in the air in a big flurry when he shot me in the back of the head and let me fall face-forward into the water. The blood would spread out around my head in the water like a halo, he said. He asked if he needed my permission to write about this in his next book. I told him I thought the imagery was actually rather derivative, but I knew he wouldn't listen to me.

where i live and what i did

2009-11-17T04:46:00.001-08:00

A city has been developing, night by night. It's increasingly hilly in the east, where I live, in a neighborhood full of coffee shops and churches and private clubs for horse enthusiasts. Its subway system is labyrinthine. At least four lines intersect at each stop, in cavernous stations with tiered platforms set up like an Escher painting. The newest stations are shiny, metallic mega-malls, full of stores and robots. The station near my house is older, dirt-packed and grungy. Trains stop at random spots, sometimes on different tracks that are only accessible by jumping down between the rails and scurrying across with all the rats.

On weekends I take the train west. At the far end of the city, the densely-packed neighborhoods give way to a series of narrow islands. A single road and multiple bridges connect them, lined with palm trees and roadside diners that specialize in key lime pie.

Most recently, I left the town entirely and ended up in Las Vegas, my least favorite place on Earth. I wandered through themed hotels and ended up with some guy who looked like Eric Bana in the backwoods on the outskirts of town. The heavy forestation seemed unlikely. We met in an abandoned campsite in someone's backyard and fell into step with each other as we beat through the underbrush.

We eventually parted ways, only to run into each other a few hours later. Eric Bana was going nuts. He was jumping over cars and sweating profusely. "You have to help!" he screamed. Apparently someone had called him and told him they had been kidnapped and taken to an unknown location, where they were tied to a chair, stabbed with a very large fish hook, and left to die. Eric Bana was trying to locate this person. "Call 911!" he told me. So I did.

* * *

I woke up early the next morning in a cold sweat, knowing I had done something horribly wrong. The 911 operator had put me on hold, so I told Eric Bana I'd call them back in a few minutes. He ran off to jump over more cars and break into houses and crack some skulls. I wandered back to the main strip and completely forgot about the unknown person gutted like a fish in some rec room somewhere. Vegas does that to you; it's so distracting. I desperately called 911 again, and left a message for Eric Bana, but in the back of my mind I knew it was too late.

best night ever

2009-10-04T06:06:00.001-07:00

I flew to Mars on a sugar-coated sunbeam. Literally.

wherever you go, there you are

2009-10-03T05:23:00.000-07:00

After a big night out on the Upper West Side, I decided to walk home along the Hudson as the sun came up. I ended up at the Frying Pan, which is a bar on an old boat docked on a pier in Chelsea. Turns out the Frying Pan was hiring. The owner offered me $4 an hour to work as a deckhand, scrubbing the decks and generally keeping the place clean. If I did a good job, she said, I could be promoted to bartender when they pulled up anchor and went south for the winter. Despite already having a job with more responsibility and somewhat higher pay, I took the position.

I ended up spending a lot of time alone in the boat, which is as old and creepy as old creepy boats can be. Sometimes I heard voices, and would roam from room to room chasing after them, only to find myself alone in the captain's quarters, scared shitless. So I started inviting my friends to hang out there during the off-hours. One day, everyone I know in New York was chilling out on the lower deck, eating peanutbutter-filled pretzels, when suddenly we were somewhere else and other people entirely.

We called ourselves the Earthlings, and we were a group of twenty-somethings who had been stranded on an island on a far away planet ever since our plane crashed there when we were eight. We were the only survivors. We killed some of the local alien animals and made ourselves some pretty kickass costumes. Mine had a monkey head for a hood that made me look like that wise old monkey dude in the Lion King. All day we would roam through the jungle, looking for food and playing at being jungle animals. At night, we built a huge campfire and told stories about our home planet. There was one guy who was quieter than the rest of us and ostensibly the leader, and he would usually spend the evenings alone out on the beach, staring at the stars. He was the only one of us who had never given up hope of being rescued. He was also kind of hot.

One night the rest of us were lazing around the fire, picking anteater bones out of our teeth, when the hot leader guy came running up all excited. With his big grizzly bear headdress and his face lit up by the flames, he was pretty impressive. "Come quick!" he shouted, and we all chased him down to the beach, where millions of stars were racing across the sky and plunking themselves down in the water. "It's a sign!" he told us, and jumped into the alien sea. We had spent the last fifteen odd years being terrified of that water, and it had kept us from swimming across to another island only a few yards away. But if this guy was going, I was going, too. We all jumped in and paddled over to the other coast.

Turns out it was New Hampshire, and we ended up in some WASPy coastal town where everyone had a North Face fleece and a spaniel. The locals gave us some funny looks, but they were too polite to say anything, so we ended up in some bookstore cafe drinking coffee and looking at all the dogs and their big floppy ears, trying to figure out what we were going to do next.

heil!

2009-09-28T14:23:00.001-07:00

We signed up a book by an author who turned out to be not only a Nazi sympathizer, but an active member of the Nazi Youth, which had gone underground and had been secretly recruiting members since after the war. I found this out when he turned in his manuscript. It was a rather banal memoir, except that every other paragraph was an excerpt from the Nazi Youth Guide for Active Boys and Girls. I was given the fun task of extracting the guide, line-by-line, before the book went to press. I stayed up all night, removing what turned out to be a rather fascinating outdoor survival guide with no mention of Nazis or any of the untoward activities one normally associates with Nazis. There were plenty of instructions for starting fires and tying knots.

secret protocol

2009-09-15T04:23:00.000-07:00

I was backpacking through a city that was kind of like New York but with even more Asian people. At the hostel, I fell in with this scruffy older man who looked kind of like a less well-preserved Jeff Goldblum. He took me to a shitty looking restaurant and told me a secret protocol. We were to order pancakes and then wait in the kitchen. After our waitress walked away (not into the kitchen), a cupboard opened and a family of four crawled out of the cramped storage space. They provided us with a map that turned out to be a fairly standard and boring walking tour of the city. I was disappointed in mangy Jeff Goldblum. He was not the street-savvy traveler I initially mistook him to be.

travel plans

2009-09-11T04:21:00.000-07:00

A couple of my friends were coming to visit, and to save costs, we had them shipped in cold storage. One of the friends was rather tall, so we had to remove her head to fit her in the container. In the back of my mind, I realized this was probably a bad plan. But it all worked out. They arrived and thawed out, and my friend's head popped right back on. She turned to smile at me and said, "hi!" Phew.

all in the family

2009-08-03T12:23:00.000-07:00

Guest post from my brother:

To start things off, I had the common post graduation dream where I forgot to write a paper for a class and just realized right before the paper is due and would fail to graduate as a result of not turning the paper in on time. I know that a lot of people have this dream, but it was the first time for me, so it kind of freaked me out. I am better now.

Moving on to more exciting things. This might be a sign that work has taken over. I was dreaming up inventions, some of which seemed like really good ideas at the time but I can't remember all of them now. The one that I do remember is a gem though. The basic concept of the invention is combining two advertising mediums, frisbees and t-shirts. The invention starts out as a frisbee with some sort of logo on it, and when you dunk the frisbee into water, it changes shape and becomes a t-shirt with the same logo on the front. In my deam I thought it was a great idea. When I awoke from the dream I laughed at myself and said no way that hasn't already been invented. I seemed to skip over the fact plastic plus water does not equal fabric. On my way to work, when I finally started to wake up, I remembered this dream and the thoughts that followed and realized that it was in fact the changing of materials that would hold this invention back, not the fact that someone has probably already done it. I could very easily check to see if it is out there but I am not going and prevent my dreams from potentially being crushed.

summer fun times

2009-07-24T04:20:00.001-07:00

My mom was driving us to a picnic, going backwards down the highway. Through the front window, we could see the cars behind us with giant matching auras towering high above them. Apparently this was the result of refraction in the tires as the cars drove through puddles. It made the cars look tall and skinny. At some point, we convinced our mom to turn the car around and put the car in drive instead of reverse, and things went much more smoothly.

At the picnic, multiple concerts were going on all around us. Happy hipsters trotted from an outdoor bandshell to a musical parade to a giant rectangular pool that covered half of Queens. It was about two miles long and a mile wide, and we all jumped in and spent the rest of the afternoon breathing underwater, doing backflips.

Then John had to go check his parents into a retirement home and I realized we were 55 years old. The afternoon went downhill from there.

saving the world is hard.

2009-07-19T07:07:00.000-07:00

It was hard to tell what the fuck was going on, exactly. There had been a number of recent technological breakthroughs that made life infinitely more complicated. I was working with an NGO that policed the poaching of endangered species in the Serengeti and/or the Sahara. I wasn't really all that sure where we were. We would wait until nightfall. By shining a light on a mirror about a mile behind us and then looking for the glinting eyes of the poachers in the reflected beam, we were able to locate them without giving away our location. Then we'd surround their camp and, you know, put an end to their poaching.

But then somehow some of us figured out how to melt themselves into goo like that thing in the first Terminator movie and then reconstruct themselves back into normal people. A portable-science-lab experiment gone awry may have been responsible. We were pondering the do-gooding possibilities of this new discovery when some poachers attacked. In the ensuing battle, one especially evil poacher was sprayed with toxic chemicals and melted into nothing. We assumed she was dead. But she wasn't. And she wasn't a poacher, either. She was a super-evil super-villain spy!

So then we had to spend all this time fighting this evil monster of our own creation, which was really hard because she had figured out how to melt at will and then turn herself into anything or anyone (kind of like that one X-Men villain, right?). Anyway, she was screwing everything up everywhere. Meanwhile, I had started dating one of the good melting guys, which was also very complicated on a much smaller scale. (My father did not approve.)

folksy rural fantasy novel, apparently

2009-07-13T03:51:00.000-07:00

I grew up in this small town in the Midwest where each generation has a secret coven of witches. Up until my generation, it was always just boys, and my dad had high hopes for my older brother. My dad was actually the head witch in his generation. The position came with a lot of power. All of the witches were really smart and popular. They could turn into dogs (collies, generally) and fly little personal spaceships, but mainly they were excellent authors. Every witch in my dad's generation was an accomplished novelist. My dad represented all the writer-witches from our town. He also somehow got to approve or reject every single novel their publisher published.

People generally found out if they were witches about halfway through high school, when it was the hardest to keep it a secret from the rest of the town. Most of the witches were pretty unpopular right up until the point where they weren't anymore, and it was all they could do to keep from lording it over the other kids who used to beat them up or turn them down for dates. My brother was already a senior in high school, and nothing had happened to him yet as far as I could tell. Then it turned out that I was the witch in the family, the first girl witch the town had ever seen.

Things got really tough for my brother then. I kind of blamed my dad. He was this really judgmental, controlling guy. He liked being in charge of all the other witches and telling them what to do all the time, and it drove him nuts not being able to get my brother to do all the magic stuff, and be a dog and fly around in the little ships and all that. The worst of it was that he was a terrible writer. My brother stopped hanging out with people. Mostly he just moped around the backyard. I would fly down in my personal spaceship and offer to take him for rides, but he just ignored me. The other witches didn't make matters any better. I think they were annoyed with my dad telling them what to do all the time, and they took it out on my brother, ganging up on him in the general store where he worked and making him drop groceries all over the place all the time. He sort of shut down. By the time I left for college he had pretty much stopped talking. I didn't come home for a long time after that.

When I left home, I tried to give up the magic. I got a job as a book editor, and I was pretty good at it. Sometimes I'd get annoyed with agents who would fight me over tiny little things---it was hard not to pull out the old magic tricks to get my way. I worked for a different publisher than the one my dad wrote for, but even so he tried to get his fingers into everything we did and tell me how to do my job. The thing was, inside the industry, the house my dad published with was getting to be kind of a joke. My dad would only let them publish old-fashioned western novels about cowboys. He was convinced these were the only books worth writing, and the only ones anyone who was worth anything really wanted to read. One time I tried to explain to my dad that times were changing, that the world wasn't the way he remembered it being, but my dad never listened to anybody.

THUNDERballs!!!

2009-07-07T05:09:00.000-07:00

One of my authors and our art director had to spend the night at my house so we could finish up a big project. Unfortunately, I didn't know in advance that they were coming over, so the place was a disaster area. Dishes piled high in the sink, magazines covering the dinner table, clothes strewn around my room like a tornado just struck. Like a good host, I asked if I could get them anything. The author asked for a snack, but there was no food in the house. The art director asked for coffee, which I did not have. So they both settled on a glass of water. Lucky me, at that moment the tap decided to freak out and start spewing a brown soapy goop into the glasses. I managed to clean them out and found some cold water in a long-expired Brita jug in the fridge.

As I carried the glasses back to my room, my brother (who was also my roommate) arrived with several boxes of pizza. The pizza came with a roll of purple paper that you could unfurl in front of you like a royal carpet. It had a picture of a king on it eating pizza. My brother unfurled it into my room, and the author and art director poked their heads out to see what was going on. "This is my brother," I told them. Then a half-naked girl came out of the bathroom. "This is Krissy," my brother said.

Krissy was my brother's new girlfriend. She was also the spokesperson for an edgy brand of bowling balls called THUNDERballs. In their viral-style commercials, Krissy would drive around the country on a bulldozer, breaking down the walls of bowling alleys and "liberating" their old bowling balls. Then she and the THUNDERballs staff would give all the bowlers brand-new, custom-made THUNDERballs and drive off, leaving the bowling alley a wreck behind them.

Just then, my dad popped out of the other bedroom. He had also decided to spend the night unannounced. This was his first time meeting Krissy. I left my brother to do the introductions, grabbed a pizza, and holed up in my room with my guests to work out the cover design for the author's book. I could hear things crashing out in the main room. I gave everyone the benefit of the doubt and assumed Krissy was giving my dad a THUNDERballs demo.

in brief

2009-06-10T07:16:00.001-07:00

I went shoe shopping with Joyce and John. Nothing much happened. John found some nice sandals.

procession music and pyramid schemes

2009-06-09T08:13:00.001-07:00

My friend Joyce wanted me to play the cello in her wedding. Or maybe it was someone else's wedding, but she said it would mean a lot to her if I played all the same. Before the ceremony, I accidentally left the cello hanging from a tree in a non-waterproof soft case, and during a sudden thunderstorm it became extremely waterlogged. I tried to dry it out as best I could, but as the water dripped from the f-holes the wood warped and separated.

The repairs would be costly. Another friend tricked me into joining her Amway-esque business operation to make some extra bucks. For $75, she gave me five gift-basket kits: a plastic bucket, a box of cheap Quality Street knockoff bon-bons, a bottle of vanilla-scented oil, and a Snickers bar. I was supposed to sell each for $20 and make a slim profit. Instead, I just ate all the Snickers. I was still pretty upset about the cello, and trying to sell people crap just makes me anxious.

alaskan intrigue and artisanal food

2009-06-05T03:52:00.001-07:00

I was being held hostage by seasoned criminals (led by Clive Owen, thank goodness!) in a gourmet grocery store in Alaska. I don't think the criminals were especially interested in keeping me, because at some point I just got into an elevator and left. The streets of this Alaskan port town were mean and tough. I felt like a foreigner, wandering through crowds of leering sailors speaking in Spanish. But at some point I had been there long enough to know the ropes, and I made a new friend who had just arrived in town. I showed her the sights, which mostly included all the specialty food shops. Her favorite was the store that just made licorice in an antique train car. "Oh, what a lovely creamery!" she said. My new friend was kind of odd.

secret show

2009-05-20T07:49:00.001-07:00

I had made plans months ago to see this show with some friends. It was somewhere in the Midwest, and I was staying with this girl I'd met a few times but whose name I had forgotten on the trip over. Luckily, she had no idea who I was, either. After dumping my stuff at this mystery girl's house, I headed down to the river, where one of my friends was supposed to arrive by submarine. The sub let people out inside a top-secret government compound and then bussed them out to the entrance. Several people threatened me with machine guns when I tried to walk in. So I waited for my friend and then we walked back to the house along the river. The trees on the banks had petrified animals hanging from the branches---frozen white frogs and squirrels. We knew the monster from The Host was swimming alongside us in the river, but we tried to act natural.

Back at the house, the parents of the girl I was staying with were throwing a raging party in the backyard. There were bonfires among the cornstalks. Maybe this was not a safe thing to do. I don't know, I didn't see a lot of corn growing up. I overheard someone saying, "Oh my god, Winona Ryder is here!" But I never saw her. It turned out this was the show we were all in town to see, which was convenient for me because I didn't need to find a ride home afterward.

At some point during the night, I wandered into the basement. It was the same as the basement at my parents' house, minus all the piles of Christmas ornaments and old ski equipment. Instead, there was a girl sitting alone at a desk under an exposed lightbulb. I knew she was the sister of the girl who let me stay there, but I didn't know her name, either. She talked to me but she didn't make any sense, so I went back upstairs and rejoined the party.

under the sea

2009-04-17T04:56:00.000-07:00

It was a dream wedding, except for the fact that I was literally wearing a mermaid dress. I must have gotten drunk and gone dress shopping at that costume store on 4th ave. It even came with a sea foam tulle train. AND a butterfly tiara that was too heavy to stay on my head (if it did, it would have given me an extra eight inches). The whole wedding was mortifying. And then afterward I had to run into the vestibule to get undressed because my parents' next door neighbor wanted to wear the same dress in her wedding, too. Tacky is contagious.

x-rated

2009-04-16T07:49:00.000-07:00

A bunch of famous American actresses ignited a huge controversy state-side when they all posed topless for a Dutch breast cancer awareness campaign. The actresses included the entire cast of The Women, which I hear was just awful. The American media went to town, reprinting the Dutch poster with all of the nipples blacked out, with the glaring exception of Michelle Pfeiffer's left breast. Scandal!

the internet is not your friend

2009-04-13T03:48:00.000-07:00

I was getting some tests done. It was a very thorough assessment, with a physical as well as a bunch of multiple-choice exams. Along the way, one of the computers in the testing facility got a crush on me. But it wasn't one of those cute wall-e "awww" crushes. This computer was a creepy little perv. He would re-arrange monitors to look up my skirt and insert inappropriate personal questions in the tests. Eventually, I took to hiding behind the test administrators so the computer couldn't see that I was in the room.

That whole ordeal went on much longer than I'd planned, so that I was late getting back to Troy to play tennis with an old college professor. He was very upset. He kept saying, "Tell me what time it is. Tell me what time it is," and "I've had enough of this!" He didn't really make any sense, but still, I felt bad. I claimed I didn't get any cellular service on the highway back from the testing facility, but really I'd just forgotten to call.

So we never did get around to playing tennis. I walked home to my parents' house, running into Rory Gilmore along the way. Or maybe it was the actress who plays her. Anyway, she was getting out of a cab, and I made fun of her for always taking cabs home, and she said, "Fuck you, I'm Rory Gilmore."

I was not making anyone happy. I ended up at some hippie retreat on a bunch of volcanic rock formations with my run club. The rocks were uneven and difficult to navigate, but these stupid local kids were just sprinting along, falling head-first every twenty feet and picking themselves back up, apparently with no major injuries. My friend Steve was trying to figure out where we were with his fancy GPS watch, but it wasn't getting any service. Then his friend managed to rig it up so that all the wireless internet in the general vicinity was rerouted to this watch. Electromagnetic waves made the air around Steve's wrist pulse like it was pavement on a summer day. I know none of this makes any sense technologically. But all of that internet in one place made me worried that my computer stalker was going to track me down, so I took off into the volcanic hills.

tell me if you've seen this one

2009-04-06T05:10:00.000-07:00

In a hybrid knock-off of both Dawn of the Dead and The Road, I once again found myself in a post-apocalyptic future. After all the zombies gave up and died again, we ventured out of the mall and started heading south. The street was full of people either running for their lives or running a marathon, and we joined the race. Zombie corpses littered the median and the sidewalks. Eventually we hit Florida, which was just as swampy and mosquito-infested as ever. A new hippie society had developed. It mostly involved people being naked and itchy, sitting around under the trees and letting their armpit hair grow long. My brother and I were being eaten alive (by mosquitoes, not those creepy cannibals from The Road), but then we met this random old couple with a Winnebago and a life supply of Off. Off is so wonderfully amazing. I love it. It made the shitty future at least semi-bearable.

sliding doors

2009-04-05T04:15:00.001-07:00

Two things were happening at the same time.

I was in a fancy liquor store with Joe, doing a fancy whiskey tasting. It was $25 for five strange whiskeys. One was extracted from acai. One was grown out of rock crystals. One was a pile of dark black pebbles that turned out to be the magic tea we needed to contain the evil water god we had set loose earlier in the evening, reducing her to nothing more than a small babbling brook.

But I was also on a high school orchestra trip, doing the whiskey tasting in a store that was part liquor store, part gambling den, part Ikea, with the little sister of a bass player in my year. It wasn't actually that guy's little sister, though. That girl's body had recently been re-inhabited by the former best friend of that girl's best friend after the latter died in an unfortunate accident that no one knew about but me, and I only knew because the girl living inside that girl's body had just told me. Needless to say, I was confused, and kept trying to get her to explain as we sipped our whiskey, but she couldn't because the best friend in question was standing right next to us.

In the first version of things, Joe and I ended up in the liquor store after tricking the water god into entering a cave intended for the new chimpanzee at the zoo next door. We then blocked the cave with a large pile of rocks, but we knew she would get out eventually. I'm not sure how the god got loose in the first place. I may or may not have accidentally invoked her earlier in the evening while riding the commuter train. But I knew that if we smuggled out enough of this black pebble tea, and either steeped and drank it or smoked it, possibly while reciting some sort of incantation, the god would be sealed into the chimpazee cave for some time period short of eternity but long enough that we wouldn't have to worry about it in our great-great grandchildrens' lifetimes.

In the other version that was happening at the same time, this second violin player I hated plopped down between me and the re-inhabited girl. "Can I borrow twenty-five dollars?" the annoying violin player asked. The girl, who was much too nice now that she was this other girl, took out the money, no questions asked. Before she could hand it over, I insisted on asking what the money was for. "Gambling," the violin asshole said, with a smug smile. "I already lost a hundred! I have to keep going." I refused to let the girl give her the money, and the violin player pouted and told me I was a bitch before storming off to the linens department.

spa fail, work fail

2009-04-04T05:01:00.000-07:00

My friend Julie and I wanted to lose some weight, so we signed up for this sleep-away spa where they use industrial floor polishers to buff the fat right off you. I know, it sounds like a bad idea. I realized this when they were halfway through my calves and accidentally sanded through to bone. I threatened to sue, and they refunded the money for the rest of the treatments, but I was limping for the rest of the weekend.

At work on Monday, I was assigned to write the next edition of our division's newsletter. The previous edition was mostly about cute cats. I wasn't sure where to start. I thought I had a pretty good first page going, about the impact of the financial crisis on our industry, but all the publicity assistants came over to my computer and made fun of it. I started researching other cute animals, preferably ones wearing clothing.

things we lost in the fire

2009-04-03T04:16:00.000-07:00

I got invited to the birthday party of this girl who worked at the place where I used to volunteer, and decided to hell with it, I was going. Also, it was being held in my parents' fancy New York penthouse apartment, so it was pretty convenient for me.

The party was actually fun. I confessed to one of the other volunteers that I was sure everyone there hated me for not volunteering anymore. "Yeah, most of them do," he said, "but I knew you didn't really fit in there anyway." Just then, there was this loud noise in the kitchen. Something on the stove was on fire. Most of the party paid no attention as the flames grew and spread.

"We have to get out of here!" I screamed. I tried to corral the party-goers toward the door, but they were having none of it. Finally, my brother and I made a run for the exit. We got to the sidewalk just as the top of the building blew off in an explosion of flames. The entire floor of my parents' apartment was made of glass, which rose up into the air in one giant sheet and then shattered against the night sky.

Our parents hadn't been at the party, and we didn't know where to find them. We were also very upset. So my brother and I decided to go get some hot chocolate. My brother had a gift card for Starbucks. While we drank the hot chocolate, we brainstormed ways to help our parents find us, seeing as our cell phones were lost in the fire. We settled on putting "Mom, Dad, call me!" in our gchat profiles. I know that's really dumb, but listen, we had just been through an ordeal.

this has all happened before

2009-04-01T04:15:00.000-07:00

It was high school and college graduation all over again at the same time. The night before I dropped my parents and my brother off at their hotel and took the car (magically transformed into the old Dodge Caravan) around the old neighborhood. As I drove by the house on Witherbee, I got a call from a friend who wanted a recommendation of where to take his boyfriend on a date in Birmingham. I told him I'd have to think about that, and in the meantime decided to head over to Birmingham myself and take in a movie. It was almost 2 am when I remembered to call that guy, and by then he and his boyfriend had broken up and he was a big slobbery sobbing mess, so I took him along to the next movie with me to cheer him up.

Luckily, the first event the next day was the band and orchestra awards ceremony, part 2, which I was already planning to use as nap time. (They gave out so many awards to the band and orch kids that they had to break it up into an evening gala, which I'd skipped, and a standard ceremony in an auditorium.) I was super bored and didn't see anyone I knew. I took out a twenty dollar bill and was going to ask the middle-aged man next to me to do something with it. Maybe it was going to be a bet or something, to make me less bored. But at that moment the marching band started a number and I was transfixed by the chubby flag girls. When I looked over, the man was pocketing my twenty!

"Hey, is that your twenty?" I asked him.

He said, "Oh, I thought you wanted me to have it." He gave it back, but then he thought we were flirting, which was awkward. Joe started calling my name from the other side of the auditorium, and I slid over to talk to him over everyone's head. I'm not sure why he was there. He was in band, but at a different high school. Still, it was good to see a friendly face.

Before I could figure it out, we all filed out to head over to the actual graduation ceremony, which was taking place at a highway toll booth in the Appalachian mountains. The teachers lined us up in rows like cars waiting to pay the toll, then we marched through to the other side to listen to the speakers. The first speaker was this guy who lived down the street and was really into biking. He may also have been a priest, judging by his collar. But he didn't bother to prepare a speech, so after a minute he started going, "umm, ummm," and got really mad at us when we stopped paying attention. The next speaker was supposed to talk inside the highway patrolman's office as we chowed down on refreshments. No one listened to her, either, and I felt bad because she was actually very good, and she had made grilled corn and chocolate truffles for us.

Then my cousin Tricia showed up, and told me I was about to lose my job at The Globe and Mail if I didn't organize a techno dance party immediately. I didn't realize I had a job there, but I also didn't want to lose it, so I rounded up six of my graduating friends and told them the rules. We had to stay within a 6'x6' dancing box, and no one could stop dancing, not even for a second. Someone cued up an Erasure remix and we were on our way.

twitter murder!

2009-03-29T06:30:00.000-07:00

The first twitter murder came to pass, sooner than anyone expected. The police didn't know what to do. They tried cordoning off hashtags, confiscating twitpics and issuing warrants for usernames. Mostly they stood around scratching their heads and saying, "What the fuck is a hashtag?"

shitty day

2009-03-28T08:27:00.000-07:00

I was at summer camp with a bunch of people from high school, and it was the last night. I came back from a hike in the woods to discover that the camp owner had left early, giving this creepy guy from my math class a ride back into town. I guess he just got sick of running his camp. The thing is, the camp was the scariest place any of us had ever been. Think Jason scary, or any other horror movie about scary shit happening in the woods. Just about everyone else was taking their chances and hiking out, hoping to get home before dark. Three kids had elected to stay, and I'd been nominated as their chaperone. Great.

So we barricaded ourselves in the camp owner's office, climbed into our sleeping bags, and prepared for a long, sleepless night.

The long, sleepless night dragged on and on, so we started poking around, only to discover old newspaper clippings from the seventies about how the camp owner had gone crazy one night and murdered an entire set of campers with a machine gun. The articles did not specify where he obtained said machine gun, or why he was allowed to continue running his camp after the incident.

"We have to notify the authorities!" I said.

Everyone else disagreed. "If we tell on him, we won't get to camp here next summer," they argued.

"Suit yourself," I said. "I'm out of here." Displaying horrible leadership skills, I abandoned the kids, walked out into the woods, and somehow found my way back to town just in time to run a half marathon. They gave us a free bus ride back to the start line, but I had to hide under a blanket because the camp owner was on the bus, posing as a doctor for the race. They would bring injured people on the bus, and he would immediately determine that amputation was the only option. His saw blades glinted in the sun, and his eyes grew large like a rabid loris' as blood splattered on his new white doctor coat. So I got off the bus.

The full marathon was starting just as I arrived. A cop stopped me from running right in front of the starting line to find my parents. As the marathon runners streamed out of the gate, I noticed my mother near the back. She started running, at a pace way too fast to sustain for the full 26.2 miles. She ran about a hundred yards, then disappeared into an open sewer grate, Wile E. Coyote style. She wasn't moving when they pulled her out. I screamed and screamed and fought to make my way across through the marathon runners, who were not making it easy for me. Everything went dark before I could get close. It was a shitty day all around.

my famous friends can't help me now

2009-01-25T10:19:00.001-08:00

I was hanging out with Michelle Obama, my best friend from college. We were getting breakfast for dinner at Denny's. Every person in the restaurant turned and stared when her husband slid into the booth, but I played it cool. We just sat around, drinking milkshakes and shooting the shit.

But I had to get going to the film set where I was an assistant and occasional babysitter for the movie's eight-year-old star. The set itself was on a beach, about twenty feet out on a sand bar made of aquamarine bathroom tiles. I waded with the young starlet and worried about my upcoming appearance on the Today show.

I had no idea what to wear, and this being a beach feature, the set wardrobe offered little in the way of emergency help. I finally settled on a nice pink blouse before promptly spilling my coffee all over it. No big deal, I thought. The rest of the cast and crew convinced me otherwise. So I found some other shirt and rushed over to the Today show, arriving thirty minutes late.

Katie Couric was back in the host role, and I prepared myself to answer whatever question she decided to throw my way. They tossed me in the interview chair, turned on the lights, and let the camera roll. Katie Couric stared at me in silence. Was I supposed to say something? I drew a complete blank. No cute anecdotes, no funny jokes, not even a boring story about what I had for breakfast. I was convinced she was supposed to be the one to kick things off, but she just raised one eyebrow and smirked. America watched me sweat and squirm. This was not going well.

new place

2008-12-29T15:59:00.000-08:00

My roommates and I moved into a new apartment. We liked all the shelf space, and the exposed brick walls. But there were several drawbacks---the giant, gym-locker-room style bathroom that took up about half the apartment and flooded on a daily basis was less than ideal. I also wasn't a big fan of the fake New Orleans interior design scheme. Each of the bedroom doors had a stained glass window etched with the name of a street in New Orleans and a stylized drawing of a jazz musician. Neon light sculptures of additional jazz musicians hung from the brick walls. Classy. I got there late, and my roommates had taken up all that wonderful shelf space with their books, DVDs and CDs, leaving me none. I threw a big fit, screaming and yelling and maybe throwing some things. Later, I apologized, embarrassed for my outburst, but things remained pretty tense.

snakes!

2008-12-23T13:37:00.000-08:00

I encountered a number of pestilences. Tornadoes. Fires. Earthquakes. The worst was the room full of snakes. This big purple cobra cornered me. I thought I was fast enough to get around it and out the door. Boy, was I wrong.

the new world

2008-12-21T09:00:00.000-08:00

I joined an improv troupe, but our chemistry was all wrong. We just weren't funny, and I think two of the other girls were clinically depressed. The rest of the group decided to order in some fried chicken, stay up all night, and work everything out, but I jumped ship and headed to Michigan to hang out with my coworkers.

They were eating dinner at the house of one of the publicity assistants' parents, which was on a Manhattan city block transposed over one of the hilly forested areas near Ann Arbor. The publicity assistant was mad because one of the publicists had taken over her bedroom and filled it with baby-related gear. The really annoying part was that the publicist doesn't even have a baby. Still, I liked what she'd done with the place. Everyone was debating whether or not to head over to a party on 6th Ave. It was only one block away, but that block was steep and icy and covered with heavy forest.

We decided to drive to the frozen yogurt place instead. It was a no-name Pinkberry imitator, and they weren't doing so well. The place was a mess, with napkins and fruit bits and yogurt residue covering every surface. I was almost to the front of the line when the place totally broke down and became two narrow strips of land running in parallel across the Atlantic Ocean. A neverending train of prehistoric animals, from pink brontosauruses to baby-blue woolly mammoths, trudged along the isthmuses toward their new homes.

I cut a perilous path between all those giant, adorable legs and soon found myself in a small port city somewhere in Spain, full of notable architecture and elevated causeways. At every corner, there was a park with artfully arranged bushes and benches, so that the heads of the people who sat there poked up like rows of cabbage, making out, taking naps, or just taking in the scenery.

carless in Los Angeles

2008-12-03T15:54:00.000-08:00

Getting around Los Angeles without a car can be a real pain, especially if all the trains are full of zombies. I was visiting friends up in the hills, but had to get to a high school reunion on another hill. I'm not quite sure how I made it, but it definitely involved a lot of running and quick-footed zombie evasion down by the train tracks. I arrived just in time to hear this girl who used to live down the street from me out her little brother. He didn't seem to be expecting it, but he handled it well.

My friends got me a room in a really nice bed and breakfast up on the hillbilly side of town. Getting there was also a challenge, but it was worth it. The next day I even snuck back in to use the bathroom after I checked out because it was just the nicest place around to do my business. Then I walked down the hill to the local fruit stand. The line for this place was around the block. A local lumberjack told me that their recent popularity was due to their delicious waffles and jalapeno tacos, but they still slept out back in the mud with their pigs. I was glad to hear that success hadn't changed them (although in their case a little upgrade probably wouldn't have hurt).

downpour

2008-11-25T15:03:00.000-08:00

I arrived in Costa Rica, which is kind of like Disneyland, and also kind of like an airport. There were turnstiles at the entrance, and then a kind of waiting area. The American tourists had a special area on one side with leather chairs and their own bartender. I stuck with the locals on the other end, waiting for a bus up to the top of the large hill that was visible from one end of the waiting area.

My bus driver was pretty cool. But when we got up to the top of the hill, he dared me to ride a skateboard all the way down on the main road, which ended on a dock and would send me straight out to sea. To be honest, I was scared shitless, but I said, "Sure, whatever."

Luckily, it started to rain just as I was about to take the plunge. The whole hillside went dark like it was moved inside a barn. Everyone in the town was sitting outside with their families at backyard picnic tables when the storm started, and they continued on with sharing their meals and company like nothing was happening, even though they were getting soaked. I waited out the deluge, dreading the aftermath.

musical journalism bus

2008-11-20T04:12:00.000-08:00

The musical journalism bus is a moving city landmark. Kids line up outside the bus depot all day, practicing their saxophones and violins and various percussion instruments, just hoping for a chance to take a ride. I was showing some friends around the city, and they all wanted to get on. Unfortunately, none of us had any musical skills. I considered auditioning with my singing, but everyone in the group quickly vetoed that idea.

Somehow we all managed to sneak onto the bus without having our credentials checked, but some jerky kid with a flute ratted us out. As the bus pulled out onto the street, the door flew open and we were pushed to the front, where a militant looking woman started to pull us off the moving bus.

"I'm not jumping off a moving bus!" I said.

"Yes you are," she said, giving me a final push. I exaggerated my recent ankle injury as I hopped down, hoping to make her feel bad. People who kick other people off moving buses are among my top ten least favorite kinds of people.

It turns out one of our friends had been holding out on us. In fact, he was kind of a scratch clarinet player. We caught up with him a few hours later when the bus dropped him off near one of the bridges. He showed us all of the pamphlets he'd received. We oohed and aahed over all the insider information on interview techniques and fact checking. "If I had known if was a stupid journalism seminar," he said, "I would have gotten off with the rest of you."

the worst

2008-11-19T06:58:00.001-08:00

In a horrible twist of fate, George W. Bush was re-instated as the president elect. He was also my brother. As he waited for the 2009 inauguration, he made me take a trip with him down to Mexico to put our parents into a cheap retirement home. I was unhappy with all aspects of this situation.

We got in a fight in the parking lot outside the Mexico City Costco. I made the mistake of asking him about his plans for his next four years of the presidency.

"Leave me alone!" he screamed. "I don't fucking want to think about it. I'm just gonna do it, okay?" The tires of our SUV squealed as he pulled into a parking spot that was much too small. We had to crawl out through the back door because there was no room on the sides.

"But you must have some kind of plan, right?" I was having trouble getting my knee over the back headrest. "There's a lot of stuff you have to fix."

"Whatever," he said. He jumped out and left me tangled in the seats.

I caught up with him in the electronics section, where we struggled to figure out the current exchange rate for the peso. W was convinced we should be getting 23 pesos on the dollar.

"But what about inflation?" I asked him.

"Fuck you," he said. He flipped me off and headed for the vegetables.

stupid beavers

2008-11-18T06:25:00.000-08:00

It started out innocently enough. Crossing a small park near my apartment, I noticed a beaver rustling around in the dead leaves. He was dragging a large saw with his mouth. Not like a chainsaw or anything crazy like that. Just your normal, old-timey-lumberjack-cutting-down-trees-in-the-woods kind of saw. It seemed like a reasonable thing for a beaver to do, especially in dam-building season. I pointed it out and said, "Isn't that cute?"

But then the beaver followed us home. I tried to keep him out, but that's hard to do when your apartment has no roof. The beaver clambered up the side of the building and tailed me around the family room like a lonely puppy. I tried to get him to leave me alone, but he started going nuts, scurrying around the apartment and bouncing off the walls. My roommate told me I should let him sit on the couch with me, that he would get bored and go away. But that just made him worse. Once he got up on the couch, he invited his dog friend along, and they both howled and panted and got dog and beaver slobber all over me. It was the worst. Never ever let a beaver in your apartment.

enemies

2008-11-16T22:28:00.000-08:00

Me and everyone I know were Batman, and the Joker demanded a face-to-face meeting to resolve things once and for all. But it was a trick. His designated meeting place was a maze of wonders, full of beautiful gardens and amazing sights and challenging intellectual puzzles. We spent hours following his route, marveling at every turn and patting ourselves on the back for our wits and sense of adventure, while back in Gotham crime raged unchecked.

tomato garden

2008-11-07T15:53:00.001-08:00

My dad has this amazing tomato garden. Red ones and orange ones and purple ones and yellow ones. He keeps them plump and juicy with an elaborate irrigation system rigged up to the roof drains. The pipes and tomato plants wind all around the house and into the garden like stringy pumpkin innards. You can hardly breathe without inhaling a tomato. Now my dad's threatening to take out all the drains and just let the rain fall where it may. I think this is a bad decision.

my shiny derelict future

2008-11-04T02:57:00.000-08:00

I was an old homeless woman who had been living on the same street corner for twenty-five years. That stability was the reason I was able to get such a good rate on car insurance. The agent cut me an excellent deal, and told me so as he shoved me up against the hood of a nearby car and pressed my face into the windshield. "The only reason I'm even giving an old hag like you any deal at all is because I know where you live, and I know I'll always be able to find you here," he said. "You got that?"

Then he had me fill out a form indicating all of the items in the lunch box my mother still made for me every morning. The rate went up slightly because I had switched from cheddar thins to whole wheat crackers, which seems counterintuitive, but who knows what crazy algorithm these insurance agents use to figure this stuff out.

The insurance wasn't actually for a car. I haven't driven in years, not since I moved to New York. But the fancy new subway cars require it. You know, the ones NASA designed? They strap you in like you're riding a roller coaster and take you from stop to stop elevated several thousand feet above the city. It's a big rush, but they haven't worked all the kinks out yet, so proof of insurance is still required.

applicants

2008-08-28T05:13:00.000-07:00

I went on a job interview. The office was in a poorly lit motel room attached to a well-lit rustic bar. My interview was with the president of the company. We sat on opposite sides of one of the double beds in the room and discussed the job requirements. I think some reference I made to Battlestar went over well, because he bounced over to my side of the bed, but I was sitting right on the edge and we both rolled right off. I squawked, rather unprofessionally, and struggled to pull myself upright on the floor. That signaled the end of the interview.

They ushered in the next interviewee as I gathered my things and squeezed past him to get out the door. The rest of the company's employees were gathered in the kitchenette off the main room, and they burst out laughing as I dashed out. I could really use a drink.

Luckily, the bartender in the attached bar was just opening up, so I bellied up and asked for some lemonade. He was pissed off, and complained for hours about kids these days while I waited for my drink. Eventually I gave up and left to meet my roommates.

They were gathered near a pond outside my old high school, trying to solve a math problem. "If we solve this problem," Erik said, "the princess will pass her class and will love us forever." I offered to help, but Erik quickly figured it out. I mean, the assignment was to find the area of a hexagon---it wasn't that hard. We just figured out different variables for the area and circumference, then asked the princess to think of her favorite thing in the whole world, write it on a piece of paper, and put it in an envelope. Somehow that was the answer.

untitled

2008-08-27T07:03:00.001-07:00

I didn't sleep at all last night. When the sun came up, I got up and punched my bed. I threw all the sheets at the wall and pounded them with the pillows. Ugh.

following your dreams

2008-08-24T07:31:00.000-07:00

A famous conservative elder senator sat next to Natalie Portman on an airplane. I can’t tell you which senator, or the details of the flight. But the senator and Portman became friends, and she convinced him to drop his staunch anti-environmentalism stance and support green initiatives. She also convinced him to go public with his transvestism.

A friend of mine tipped me off about the senator’s upcoming presentation at a breakfast meeting for an important Senate committee and hooked me up with a press pass. The meeting took place in an old theatre, and I took a seat in one of the boxes. The committee members and their aides were spread around the main floor, lacklusterly eating donuts, drinking coffee, and looking through paperwork. Several of them were doing the crossword puzzle.

The senator came on stage in his usual gray suit and striped tie. Natalie Portman came out with him, also wearing a suit and tie. The two of them looked the room over in silence. Then some burlesque music started playing, and they started dancing. In unison, they ripped off their suits to reveal fringed black thongs with rhinestone embellishments. Both of them were topless. They shimmied across the stage in the name of the environment, but the committee members were nonplussed.

My friend who had got me in escorted me out through the stage entrance. “We knew he was going to do that today, so we didn’t invite the press,” he said. “Thank god half the committee members were missing, too.”

I thanked him for the show, then hurried off to meet my family for our trip to the pick-your-own-fruit farm. We all packed into the van, my parents and my brother, my cousins, my aunt and uncle, my grandparents, and the foreign exchange student who was my rival. We found a pretty good spot in the harvested hay field that doubled as a parking lot and headed in, only to find that it was actually the Olympics.

I received a schedule that told me I was supposed to be running in the women’s 200m qualifier heats on a certain day, but the date had been cut off on my schedule, so I wasn’t sure when. I was pretty sure I missed it. I got really mad and started screaming at my dad. “How can you just sit there when I just missed my only chance to be in the Olympics?” I hollered. He got mad, too, and we both went into hysterics. But then it turned out I was already qualified for the final, so I dashed down to the track to take my spot.

There in the next lane was my rival, the foreign exchange student who had been making my summer miserable. She was running for Romania, I think, but I never really paid attention to where she was from. We set up our blocks and got into starting position. Then the gun went off and I ran my heart out. I thought I’d come in last. After all, I hadn’t run a 200m dash since high school, and even then I wasn’t very good. But it turns out I finished second, losing by a hair to that goddamn foreign exchange student. I hate her, I hate her, I hate her. But, you know, spirit of the games and all---I walked over and shook her hand. She smiled her smug Romanian smile and I wanted to punch her face off.

late-night bike adventures

2008-08-20T04:29:00.000-07:00

I was staying in a fortress with my extended family. The grownups got bedrooms and my cousins got the foldout couches. I was stuck on a cot in the corner, which was fine, because the foldout couches were pretty much impossible to sleep on anyway. Someone important was also staying with us, or else we were somehow important, because the fortress was heavily barricaded and guarded.

To pass the time, we conducted experiments on slugs. At first I thought the slugs were kind of gross, but I got over it. Soon I let them crawl along my arms and snuggle against my ear. Looking back, this is still kind of gross.

So the hypothesis we set out to prove in the current experiment was that slugs, being stubborn and contrary, would only eat food we did not want them to eat. We set out a chicken caesar wrap on a table and let the slug do its thing. It ignored the wrap. Instead, it crawled on my arm, down my torso and leg, and onto the floor under the table, where someone had dropped a stray french fry. The slug latched onto the fry and hightailed it for a corner of the experiment room.

My partner exclaimed, "It's true! He went for the fry!"

The slug, who had turned into a small man resembling Kal Penn, shouted tinily, "Of course I did! Can't you give me some real food? Who wants a freakin' wrap?" He was carrying the french fry, which was about half his height, in both arms like a giant bag of laundry.

Suddenly, one of the copy editors, who had also been staying with us, went nuts. She was convinced the guard stationed outside the front door and across the highway was actually a terrorist planning to kill us. She tore out of the door with a gun, and we all chased after her to try and stop her. We dodged through the traffic on the five lane highway like it was multiplayer Frogger and assembled on the dusty median, where the copy editor was pointing the gun directly at our guard. The guard was actually a very nice, non-terrorist guy, and we all knew it. The copy editor's eyes looked all crazy. Her normally neat hair was blowing around in unseemly wisps.

She fired several shots, but her aim was terrible. The bullets came right at me, and I had to run around in the median trying to dodge them. Luckily, my bike was there, and I hopped on and took off. I had plans to hang out with my soccer team at the movies, anyway.

The cinema had a whole room devoted to self-serve candy---at least twenty of those giant gumball machines that give you handfuls of Mike and Ike or Sour Patch Kids instead of gumballs. There were also displays of candy bars that you paid for on the honor system. One of those creepy twins that I keep seeing around town (at dodgeball, on the CUNY station, at H&M, in my dreams) stormed in, told us to cover for her, and ducked down to steal some candy bars. My other friends pointed out the security cameras. "But it's not like they really care if you steal anything," one of them said. Regardless, I was too chicken shit to take anything.

I hopped on my bike again to head home. It was now dark out, and I was trying to turn left at the intersection of 14th and 6th without a helmet. I should mention that I have never ridden my bike in Manhattan before, ever. It was terrifying. I took off as quickly as I could at the light and tried to keep up with traffic, but there were cars everywhere, and for some reason I was carrying a book that prevented me from braking with both hands.

I stopped in at a coffee place, where this really cool person I know works. I wish I could be as cool as she is. I don't really wish I worked at a coffee place again. I was there with an investment banker type who somehow had never been in a coffee place before. He must live under his desk or something. We were standing outside, talking to the cool barista girl, when an elderly couple from the neighborhood walked by. The barista went inside and made them free drinks because they were a charity case. We waited for them in the store, browsing through bins of death-themed tchotchkes. They soon came back, showing off their fancy drinks---a peanut butter mocha ripple and a coconut latte.

My banker friend became fascinated with the drink process---although I think he just had a crush on my cool friend. He watched her make all sorts of drinks for other customers, putting a dollar in the tip bar every once in a while, even though she hadn't made him a drink. I got fed up and decided to continue my trip home, but that meant riding on the 110 freeway at 11 p.m., and I knew I wasn't going to get very far.

brief summaries

2008-08-17T05:37:00.000-07:00

I wanted to buy a large inflatable apple from Goodwill, but it wasn't for sale.

I got a job arranging plastic food for a banquet in a model home.

I read a book and realized it was set in my apartment, two years before I moved in.

I found out George Harrison had written a Beatles song about me. It had my name in it, but he spelled it wrong.

I needed a copy editor to work on a book by these twins who own a pizzeria and play dodgeball, but they had all gone to the seashore to take pictures. The copy editors were all fully dressed in tweed and corduroy, and they were getting wet sand all over their sensible shoes.

green performance art

2008-08-12T14:18:00.000-07:00

I was taking turns living in an igloo in a foreign city that may or may not have been Bangkok. I'm leaning toward "may not," as it seems unlikely that an igloo would last very long in Thailand, and this living arrangement went on for months. At the end of it, my igloo-mates returned to New York to turn the experience into a performance piece. The performance was completely organic, with zero carbon footprint. Instead of explosions, they used some kind of hemp-based steam. We lounged about in a large square park as they projected images into the trees. My friends hated it, but after all that time in the igloo I couldn't stand to hear them belittle my experience. We sort of caused a little scene among all the blissed-out environmental activists. I was mortified.

late for class (with bikes!)

2008-08-08T04:25:00.000-07:00

I was back in high school, and needed to get from Troy High to Athens High in 40 minutes for a class. So I decided to ride my bike. The ride was so so hard, uphill all the way, and my bike is kind of crappy. It didn't help that halfway along I obtained an intern, a slow dumpy girl who wasn't very bright and insisted on asking me stupid questions the whole time. Every five minutes, she would get distracted by something and stop or pull into oncoming traffic. I got so frustrated that I tried to leave her behind, only to hear her yelling, "Wait for me! Wait for me! Don't leave me!"

We stopped at a pier to do something sneaky with motorboats, and then at my aunt and uncle's house. After that, or maybe before, we came across my dad's tunnel amusement park, which consisted of two short tunnels you could ride your bike through. Making ghost noises in the dark was encouraged.

All in all, the trip took way longer than it should have.

my mother, the entrepreneurial earth goddess

2008-08-05T03:48:00.000-07:00

My mom decided to open her own store, one of those places that sell jewelry and incense and herbal remedies. This sort of place seemed out of character for her, but I agreed to help her set it up when she promised me I could work behind the counter on my days off.

Apparently, starting this kind of store involved secreting a large bundle of starter herbs out of the jewelry/incense/herbal remedy store where she was already working (I had no idea!). We had to sneak in when the owner was out to lunch. My mom's friend and co-worker went behind the counter and pulled out a large bundle of some pink-flowered herb I'd never heard of, wrapped in a swaddling cloth. My mother held it like a newborn. "Let's get out of here," she said.

anti-strip search

2008-08-04T04:50:00.000-07:00

My family was returning from a visit to Soviet Russia. It might also have been Iran. At the border, guards made us get out of our car while they searched it. As we watched from a distance, they opened all of our bags and put on every piece of clothing we'd packed. One guard had on five shirts, three coats, and a pair of underwear on his head. They appeared to be conducting a Chinese fire drill, jumping in and out of the car and running---prancing---around in our personal effects. This was hard to watch.

To pass the time, we wandered into a freedom garden erected on the non-Soviet or non-Iranian side of the border. A balcony extended over the border, with grates in the floor so you could look down and see the foreign ground. There was a library section with the 100 greatest books of freedom of all time. For some reason it was all American writers from the 1920s. But they were all first editions, and I couldn't help thinking they would be worth a lot of money if they ever made their way out of this garden in the middle of nowhere.

enforcement agents

2008-07-30T03:49:00.001-07:00

I was hanging out on the beach in Iraq when two American soldiers arrived. They faced off with some Iraqi sunbathers, West Side Story-style, then pulled small silver cylinders out of their pockets in unison. The cylinders expanded into long tubes, and a bouquet of rounded prongs popped out of the end. The soldiers held the silver contraptions over their heads like chef hats and danced around. You would think it looked ridiculous, but it was actually very menacing and intimidating.

The soldiers pulled hand cranks out of the small end of the silver chef hats, and suddenly I realized they were holding giant mechanical whisks. They inserted the whisks in the sand in front of the Iraqis and mixed the sand up into a frenzy. As they mixed, the whisks expanded to become a set of large wheels, and then two large beach bicycles. The soldiers hopped on the bikes and pedaled off along the beach.

I was about to go for a run, so I ran in their direction. The beach soon ended and became a series of crowded streets filled with bazaars. Most of the stalls were selling discount footwear. I finally caught up with the bicycle-riding soldiers, only to discover they were my friends Jake and Branda. I asked how they made their strange bikes, and Branda told me they got them out of a mail-order catalog for way too much money, considering they were already falling apart after one ride.

Then my mom swung by in a special car for legally blind drivers. We both pretended to be blind, which involved sitting in the back seat and hugging large teddy bears with "legally blind driver" printed across their chests. My mom took a wrong turn into the parking lot where all the cops hang out. "Just play it cool," she said.

Our car coasted through the crowded parking lot like a baby seal through a den of sleeping polar bears. There were all kinds of cops---city cops, state troopers, security guards, park rangers, mounties. I pretended to be blind. Suddenly, a cop was rapping on my window. I rolled it open for him, and he said, "I'm gonna have to take you in."

I said, "But we're legal," and pointed to the teddy bears. We had him, and he knew it, too. But he was on his home turf and had something to prove. He pulled out his baton and lightly rapped it against his palm. I started sweating like crazy. I tried to remind myself that just hearing that noise wouldn't really intimidate a blind person. If anything, it sounded like he was casually applauding our efforts. But out of the corners of my not-actually-blind eyes, I could see the other officers closing in on our car. This wouldn't end well.

barbeque ghosts

2008-07-24T04:20:00.000-07:00

I finally went to Dinosaur BBQ up by Columbia, only to find it had been infested by ghosts. Twisty white wisps of ghostiness twisted up from the roof instead of delicious-smelling barbeque smoke. We took some pictures. On the screen of Joyce's digital camera, the ghosts looked past us with empty stares.

So we decided not to get barbeque.

Instead, we attended a happy hour I'd organized for young publishing professionals. There was a pretty good turn out.

worst parents' weekend ever

2008-07-23T04:19:00.000-07:00

My parents' were in town, and I wanted to show them a fun New York weekend. It didn't quite work out that way. I tried taking them to the pool party at McCarren Park, and we got there really early, right after my parents got out of church. But at 11 a.m., the line was already all the way around the pool, down the block, and across the Pulaski Bridge into Queens. We waited in line for a long time.

Eventually I gave up and took my mom out to breakfast with my friend Steve and his sister. My dad must have gone home, disgusted with all the queuing. I guess it was a fancy breakfast. I offered to pay for my mom and myself and ended up shelling out $100 for eggs and coffee.

Then my brother and I started breaking into people's apartments, just to check them out. We saw a cute attic room, and an apartment inside a large sailboat with a tendency to flip over even in the mildest weather. The sailboat apartment was full of clues. We discovered a tiny little wrench taped to the thigh of the guy who lived there (he was asleep). Then we found equally tiny little pieces of copper tubing under all the cushions in the room. The more clues we found, the bigger they got, until the entire floor was covered with nuts and bolts that we could barely scoop up into our arms without dropping them everywhere. At some point, we decided to let the clues be clues and leave the mystery for someone else to solve.

Now I was faced with the problem of finding a subway that would take me to work from Queens. The locals were full of useless advice. I took a B or a D further away from the city to catch an M, which seemed wrong, and someone told me it was running local on the weekend anyway. To transfer to the M, I had to climb down out of a parking structure, cut across a perfectly manicured lawn, walk through a very formal living room (which I think is more correctly called a salon), and hop a fence to cross more lawn. The whole time, I could see the train coming. In my hurry I kept tripping and getting stuck on fence posts and knocking over televisions. The various people I'd asked for directions crowded around and cheered me on.

The M station was very technologically advanced, with shuttle pods that would airlift senior citizens directly to Broadway shows. Still, I had to buy my ticket from an angry old woman at the bar, which took some more time. What I'm trying to say is, I totally missed that train, and I knew I would be stuck in Queens forever.

camping, and not camping

2008-07-22T06:51:00.000-07:00

I went camping in someone's backyard in Michigan. I'm not sure who came with me, but she'd never been to Michigan before. It was a terrible night. There was heavy rain, and lightning, and crocodiles crawling around in the tree branches. A couple of deer wandered into the backyard, and I pointed them out to my friend. She was impressed.

But then the night got even worse. Something attacked the deer---it was pretty dark, but in the brief bursts of light from the lightning I made out lions, cheetahs, water buffalo. The deer stood over us protectively. Blood gushed from their flanks. They didn't speak, but I could tell they wanted us to get the hell out of there and save ourselves. So we did. I mean, the house was only about ten feet away, so we went back inside and waited out the storm.

Once it stopped raining, my parents took us to crash someone else's family reunion. We stood in line next on the Wattles I-75 overpass. The people in front of us were taking way too long to hand over their tickets, so we jumped the line and hopped over the turnstiles. This was an unusually rebellious move for my family.

The other family's reunion was pretty lame. I milled about with my mom and dad and brother and unidentified friend. I wanted my mom to play Skee-Ball with me, but I couldn't remember what the game was called, and it didn't seem like they had it there anyway. My mom did find a tub full of pool balls. It looked like those pits of rainbow-colored plastic balls they used to have in the play areas at McDonald's, although trying to jump in it would probably have been pretty painful. We wisely decided not to try. Our rebellious phase was over.

the Israeli army story

2008-07-21T06:35:00.000-07:00

I was hanging out with my friend Larry, helping him get ready for his wedding. I told him this story about an Israeli army officer. I have no idea what the story was about, or why I told it, but apparently Larry really liked it.

This became apparent when I showed up at the ceremony and saw my name in the program. I was up right after the minister's opening remarks, telling my story about an Israeli army officer. I sat down at the back of the church. The church itself was outside in a garden, but my seat was behind a wall in the back area. I sat down on a stool in front of a window looking out on the proceedings and hoped no one would notice me.

They noticed me. Five minutes in, Larry called out my name. He pointed at me in the back and beckoned me on stage. "You guys are going to love this story," he said into the microphone, before ushering me in front of the podium.

I drew a total blank. There must have been hundreds of people there, and they all stared at me expectantly, with those polite smiles people have when they're sitting through weddings. "Hey, everyone, isn't Larry a great guy?" I said into the mic. Everyone nodded in agreement. I couldn't even remember how my story started. I shuffled through the papers on the podium, looking for a clue. There was no clue. I was stuck.

Exes and Drunks

2008-07-18T06:59:00.001-07:00

One of my exes tried to rekindle the old flame, but I apparently was having none of it. I told him we should just be friends, and he told me he could do better anyway. So he went off in a huff to the Brazilian supermodel he had waiting in the wings, and I went off to find my friends Kelly and Todd. They were on their way to check out the swim club they had just joined.

It turned out the pool was in the middle of a dive bar in a sketchy part of town. As we splashed around in the surprisingly clean yet small pool, old drunk men leered at us from the barstools. They seemed really upset that the swim club was encroaching on their establishment. It was a bad scene. The gentrification around here is really getting out of hand.

family vacation

2008-07-12T07:56:00.000-07:00

I was supposed to go on a trip to northern Canada with both sides of my extended family. At first, they were all crashing in my apartment. They rearranged all the furniture, left my grandad on the couch, and went shopping. I was having one of those days where I just couldn't wake up. I dragged myself out of bed around noon with my eyes full of sleep gunk and stumbled into all the newly relocated couches and chairs. My favorite shoes were sitting right outside my door, and when I kicked them by accident they went flying in opposite directions. One shoe I found under a couch; the other I never saw again.

Then we were at my parents' house in Michigan. I brought my friend Erica and we all hopped in the van to drive to Canada. Halfway to the border I realized I'd left my passport in New York, and I forgot to pack any extra shoes. I was wearing my old running shoes, which I hate. I would look like a stupid tourist all week, running around in smelly white athletic footwear. That is, assuming I got past the border.

My mom refused to turn back. She said we would ask the border guards to issue me a new passport when we got to the bridge. I was skeptical.

But then I was alone in Kitchener, trudging up a snow-covered road, trying to find my cousin and uncle. They were waiting for me in the park, which wasn't snow-covered. Actually, it was a pretty nice day, and dogs were running around all over the place. My uncle had to go somewhere for a minute, and my cousin showed me his special phone. He had a new job with the University of Waterloo, and they issued him a big blue plastic phone that was always connected. My cousin told me whoever was on the other end of the line would provide any information, and do whatever my uncle asked. She goaded me into trying it out.

So I picked it up and held it to my ear. "Hello?" someone said. "Oh, wrong number," I said, and quickly put it back down.

All of a sudden all the dogs went nuts and ran after something on the other side of a hill. There were hundreds of them, all different shapes and sizes. "It's a cat!" someone yelled. And then it was. The cat was booking it, running in every direction with the dogs close on its tail. It ran past our blanket, then attempted to climb a tree that was much too short to get it away from the dogs. "Don't do it!" I yelled. It gave up on the tree, but I could tell it was getting tired. As it staggered on, a vulture swooped out of the sky and nailed it just as all the dogs were closing in. Poor cat.

stolen cars, road trips, bad paint jobs

2008-06-28T06:39:00.001-07:00

My friend roped me into helping him hand out fliers for a new local restaurant outside the long-established local homeless shelter. I spent about two hours standing there in the cold and snow, only to discover that my friend had been sitting inside the restaurant the whole time.

He felt really bad about the whole thing, so he stole and hot wired a really shitty car for me. "It's all yours!" he said, and I putt-putted off into the night.

For some reason, driving a stolen car made me really uncomfortable. The first chance I got, I ditched it on a suburban street and wandered around until I was totally lost and would never be able to find it again. Then I found myself an equally shitty bike and rode it to my soccer game in Golden Gate state park.

After that I had to go on a road trip with my family. We got stuck in traffic just outside Detroit, so we got out of the car and sat down in the median with a large group of German exchange students. They were singing boisterous German national anthems, and it drove us nuts.

Eventually we managed to make our way to our actual destination, a very small political convention at my parents' neighbors' house. The neighbors made us dinner and pulled out the sofa bed for us. The next morning, my grandfather and I spent about half an hour trying to figure out how to put the couch back together. Then I had to repaint all the walls in their family room. I chose tar black, and came up with the brilliant idea of pouring it on really thick at the top and letting it drip down. Unfortunately, it didn't stop dripping when it hit the bottom of the wall. It leaked over onto the floor and formed strange goopy paint formations. I crawled around on my knees, trying to scoop up the extra paint with a spoon before it could dry. Everyone else was in the kitchen eating breakfast. It sounded delicious.

snakes and authors

2008-06-25T05:17:00.000-07:00

One of our authors hired me to reorganize his work space, so I took the train upstate with some of my coworkers to check it out. The place was kind of awful. It was a one-bedroom ground-level railroad. The author slept in the back, then rented out the bedroom during the day to a college student who only went outside after dark.

We all arrived the night before and crowded together to sleep in the bedroom. Then the college kid arrived and tossed all our stuff into the main office. Already the place was a disaster. The author and his employees did most of their work huddled in the kitchen area, piling stacks of paper precariously along the edge of the counter. I suggested moving the main work area over to a large and unused table in the middle of the room. They were skeptical, but decided to humor me.

The author stayed over by the kitchen. He seemed to be cooking. I had been hoping he would be working on the book he owed us. Then random people started trickling in off the street and placing sandwich orders. The author explained how his office doubled as a deli at lunch time to bring in extra cash.

After the lunch rush, we went outside to check out the store front. The front wall of the building appeared to be plastered with stickers from stock racing teams and skateboarding retailers. It was hard to tell what the building was supposed to be.

I was about to explain the importance of easy-to-read signage when my boss came running around the corner screaming. There was a large orange snake wrapped around his neck. The author seemed nonplussed. "We don't have any poisonous snakes around here," he said, and went back inside to make more sandwiches. That didn't console my boss, who continued to scream and run laps around the building.

escaping, cheating, celebritizing

2008-06-15T09:06:00.000-07:00

I had to attend an event for work at the President's Club, some sort of exclusive secret society where celebrities come to watch variety shows at the top of a fancy hotel.

We came with Matt Lauer, who was having a hard time getting in. He kept saying, "Don't you know who I am? I'm Matt Lauer!"

The people at the door shrugged. "To be honest," one of them said, "I don't think you're famous enough, Matt." I had to help some people carry in some equipment from the van, but when I got back we were clear for entry, so Matt must have demonstrated enough celebrity credentials, or paid off the bouncers.

Upstairs, the room was packed with famous people, but not the ones you would necessarily expect. I saw Mariah Carey, and George Clooney (actually, he probably is one of the ones you'd expect). I didn't recognize the rest of the people, but I assumed they were famous for things I didn't know about. I haven't been keeping up with People and US Weekly lately.

All that famous in one place kind of freaked me out. It freaked out my coworker, too. We decided to make an early exit, but we were worried people would see us and realize we weren't famous. We knew that would mean big trouble. Unfortunately, the elevators would only come if you had a registered celebrity ID, so we were kind of stuck. We stood by the elevator bank looking around nervously until another celebrity arrived and we were able to slip into the elevator as he got out.

I was so happy when we got out of that place. But then I ran into my friend, who confessed to me that she was cheating on her boyfriend with the guy I'm dating. I couldn't tell if she knew I was dating him, but I acted supportive anyway. "You're just doing what's right for you," I said. In truth, I was really mad at her. Her boyfriend is a great guy, and I couldn't understand why she would ever do that to him. It seemed very out of character for her.

Only later did it occur to me that I should have been mad at her for sleeping with my boyfriend.

eww, eww, eww

2008-06-09T19:16:00.001-07:00

This one is a little grosser than usual...

I was a living skeleton, somehow still alive despite losing all of my non-bone body mass aside from a little bit of skin, which covered some of the bones. I also had hair, and a tongue, which lolled dryly out of my skeletal mouth like layers of moldy filo dough. I couldn't really move much, but sort of shrugged around on a couch while people discussed me in the kitchen. "It's amazing she lived to be this way," someone said. "Most people die long before they reach the skeleton stage. It's because it all happened so slowly." The other one said something about anorexia, and when I heard what had happened to me I was so embarrassed.

Then I was myself again, sometime before all this happened, looking on. There's no way I'm going to let that happen to me, I thought. I love food. I looked at my normal-ish body in the mirror, but already I could see that I was losing flesh. Not in a uniform way, but in chunks missing from my abdomen and arms. My skin puckered over the submerged holes like cellulite.

Suddenly I had horrible diarrhea. It seemed like it was never going to stop. In fact, it never did stop. At some point I realized it was probably time to make an appointment with a gastroenterologist.

driving, walking, tricked

2008-06-01T19:08:00.000-07:00

My parents just bought a house right next door to Steve Jobs, on a densely treed street somewhere in Birmingham, Michigan. So maybe I screwed up a bit and stole my parents' car and drove without a license and got caught. And so now I had to walk home with Steve Jobs' kid, who I wasn't actually even aware existed until now, when we were walking from somewhere many miles away from home. I didn't even really know where we were going, but I kept my spirits up for the kid's sake. By the time we walked past that cemetery further down on Woodward, we were both pretty pooped. I called my parents and asked for a ride. Steve Jobs was over, I guess having tea with my parents or something. When he heard where we were, he insisted my parents come pick us up, so mini-Jobs and I stood by the side of the road waiting. My parents were there pretty fast, probably because we were only two blocks from the house. Good one, Steve Jobs.

boring, book, parties

2008-05-29T19:02:00.000-07:00

My friend, who's a chef, but looks a lot like another guy I know who isn't a chef but is actually a stand-up comedian and a screenwriter, was having a book party for his first book, a cook book which I highly recommend. Danny Meyer was hosting for him, in his loft apartment which doubles as a yacht.

As the party went on, and everyone mostly ignored me as is generally the case at these sorts of events, the loft--yacht detached from the building and floated around the streets of New York City, which were conveniently flooded at the time.

Everyone wanted to talk to my chef friend, so I wandered to the front of the yacht and befriended the housekeeper, who was working double duty tonight as the yacht captain. She showed me how to steer and let me take the wheel for a little while. We reached the end of the West Village and launched out into the Hudson River. There were some great views, but they were hard to see, what with all the rain.

At some point, my glasses fell off my face and flew overboard. I'm pretty sure it was somewhere on the LES. After the party was over, the housekeeper and I backed the yacht up over our route, checking the gutters for them. Of course I didn't find them. I'm pretty much blind without my glasses.

you, me, everyone we know

2008-05-26T10:49:00.000-07:00

I went to the beach with my whole family, my parents and my grandparents and my aunts and uncles and cousins and all my brother's friends and some of my friends, too. It was a warm day, but not very sunny, and the ocean was a depressing slate gray from far away. When you were actually in it, the water was amazingly clear and full of giant koi in bright oranges and yellows and white.

So we were all hanging out on the beach on assorted beach blankets under rainbow umbrellas. Suddenly, my grandmother announced that my aunt was missing. She had gone swimming in the ocean and never came back. This aunt died twelve years ago, but I guess she was back for the day. We all jumped in the water to look for her. I hugged the coastline to the north, treading water through the koi, looking down at the bottom. Eventually the ocean narrowed into a sort of canal that cut inland. I continued to swim along until it started going through rooms with dramatic lighting from above. There was an apartment, a kitchen, a dorm room, a computer lab.

Eventually, I ended up in a giant restaurant at the University of Michigan. It was packed full of everyone I'd ever met. I started going from table to table, staring at all the faces and asking people if they'd seen my aunt. No one had.

rock show, church, rock show

2008-05-20T04:08:00.000-07:00

My friend Joe's band had a show with a bunch of other bands. It was in some kind of church, and it was pretty good. After the show, I went to hang out with all the bands at a giant house in the suburbs. I was way tired, but they never went to sleep. People kept locking themselves in the bathroom and having to be coaxed out by their friends, which was annoying whenever I needed to use it. At 4 a.m., I finally passed out on an air mattress in the living room, which was more like a gymnasium at an elementary school that could double as a cafeteria. But before I knew it, everyone was pulling me up to do calisthenics. We pranced around the main room in a big circle, doing jumping jacks and skipping. Not exactly what I was expecting for an after-party.

The house was in a hilly city that was like San Francisco, but darker and more forested. There were tunnel staircases that went from one street to another, but they were kind of creepy looking so I generally took the long routes.

Later on I had to drive my family to church, but there was nowhere to park. We skipped the first mass and lurked in the parking lot until everyone left so we could steal a good spot. But that meant we were way early, so my dad suggested we check out a Pixies concert in Somerset Mall. I never got into the show because I spent all the time in the car trying to decide what to wear. For some reason I only had a suitcase full of dirty running clothes. My options were sweaty shorts and t-shirts with holes in them. I also had one pair of pants that were too small and made wooshing noises when I walked. I went with the pants, even though I knew I looked stupid.

bowling, desk change, swimming

2008-05-19T04:06:00.001-07:00

I was having trouble with directions. My best friend was trying to follow me around New York in a car. My dad was driving like the out-of-towner he is and breaking all the traffic laws. We accidentally got into the lane for a bridge out of the city, but my dad pulled a U-turn at the last second. My friend got stuck in traffic on the bridge for an hour and was late for bowling.

I was a terrible bowler. I'd throw the ball one way and hit pins in another lane. My roommate wasn't much better. We were all having trouble following the rules and remembering not to throw more than twice in a row. I kept hitting the thing that comes down to reset the pins, which at this place looked like a red velvet curtain.

Then they offered us new desks at work, but I was back in high school and those desks were reserved for the newspaper staff. I was jealous of them because I never had room in my schedule to take the journalism class. As it was, I was going to have to drop regular orchestra or Girl Scout orchestra. My mom thought I was crazy, but I was leaning towards dropping the Girl Scouts. At least then I wouldn't have to wear that stupid uniform anymore.

I ended up with one of the new desks anyway. It was way worse than the desk in my old office, set up hastily on those fake wood tables with uncomfortable plastic chairs in a large library-like room. We didn't even get our own areas. I had to share a table with this girl I've always hated. The computers looked like they were from 1985. I can't believe I signed up for this switch. To make matters worse, new desks were in a contained living facility. We were not allowed to leave for any reason, although I was seriously considering breaking out to go meet up with my parents at the beach.

We lived in dorm rooms above the work space, and they offered us a shopping area once a week that everyone was excited about. I climbed down the stairs to the outdoor fenced-in area to check it out early one Saturday morning. Beyond the fence, giant fields of rich green grass flowed out in every direction. Large groups of students dressed all in black were practicing different group exercises inside the fence. Yoga, tai chi, miming.

Then it was open swim and everyone jumped in the pool. I was shy about getting in because I thought I didn't know anyone, but then I noticed all these girls I knew from high school splashing around. My Caribbean lit professor from the University of Michigan was there in a flowery bathing suit. She gave me a hug over the divider between the shallow end and the deep end and asked me when I was going to call her up in Toronto and meet her for lunch. I promised to do it really soon, although I'm not sure how if I'm stuck in this place.

aliens, fires, the end of everything

2008-05-18T10:41:00.000-07:00

It was the end of the world, aliens arriving by water in giant dragon-faced ships. We could see them from the beaches in L.A., coming in fast. Forest fires broke out spontaneously on the dried-out summer hills. It was hard to maneuver around the flames, even if we knew where to go.
We pretty much knew we were all going to die.

Jamaica, suburbs, floorplans

2008-05-18T07:03:00.001-07:00

I went to Jamaica with my grandparents to visit a small town on the northwest side of the island. This wasn't like the Jamaica I remembered. Actually, it looked a lot like an American suburb, except slightly more jungle-like. My usually overly protective grandparents even let me walk around on my own, wandering down a tree-lined street to find a an orange grove and a collection of colonial-style houses. Kids were playing baseball in the street with plastic bats.

We were staying at my uncle's house, a giant place full of extraneous doors and mysterious staircases. The place just kept expanding. Eventually, I found a staircase that led up from the attic to a spacious loft apartment, a little dusty but otherwise fantastic. Floor to ceiling windows, a baby grand piano in the kitchen. Apparently no one had known it was there.

When we went outside and looked up at the house to figure out where everything was, we saw a twelve-story apartment building rising from the roof, above my uncle's house and the newly discovered loft. The whole thing looked like it was about to fall over. In Jamaica, homebuilding is kind of an iterative process.

camping, animals, danger

2008-05-14T09:42:00.000-07:00

A few days ago I went camping in the redwood forest. There were tall trees and tents and wild animals and s'mores and everything. Late at night, after we all pooped out in the aforementioned tents, the wild animals began to forage. A bear went after our food, and my friend wanted to jump out of our tent to stop it. I held him back. "It isn't worth it!" I said. That's when the tiger arrived and started slinking around our campground like it owned the joint. When it roared at us, we both popped back inside the tent and stayed put. Strangely enough, the animals didn't end up taking any of the food. They did rip open my friend's brand new Skip-Bo game, though. Animals love Skip-Bo.

Hamptons, Patrick, housewarming gifts

2008-05-08T02:48:00.000-07:00

I have a place out in the Hamptons. I tell myself it's cheaper than living in the city, but I'm probably wrong about that. We have a kiddie pool out back, and I steal water from the neighbors when they aren't looking.

Patrick Stewart came to visit and presented me with a jarful of quarters, each individually wrapped in blue cotton fabric and tied with a tiny little bow. I said, "Wow! Thanks, Patrick Stewart!" But really I was thinking, shit, it's going to take me forever to unwrap all these quarters.

adventures, babysitting, swamp

2008-05-07T04:20:00.000-07:00

There's this big swamp right by the Hudson River in New York. At one end, there's a dock where people desperately try to get on boats and emigrate to the other side. Jersey, I guess. Things must really be bad in New York. There's also an outdoor bar at one end of the swamp, with tree stumps for chairs and vines all over the place, where I spent hours with two friends from work trying to find something good on the jukebox.

We'd just about given up when we met this guy who writes for an adventure magazine. Their thing is to profile crazy adventurers by taking the whole staff and reliving entire journeys. Every month, the publisher and the writers and the copy editors and the sales team and the intern would all take off for a remote locale, climbing Mount Everest in t-shirts, crossing the Pacific in a dinky little raft. This month they were living in the swamp, which is full of snakes and alligators in the wet bit in the middle. This guy had just walked/swam across, and he looked terrible. We all felt bad for him and bought him drinks.

Later that day I had to babysit these two kids, a little girl and a little boy. I'm not sure where I got them. I had a feeling they were my niece and nephew, but that didn't seem quite right. These kids HATED each other. They were constantly fighting over who was better. The little boy was a lot like the guy who swam across the swamp. The little girl was a lot like me.

A bar is no place for small children, and I had to get back to work anyway. So I took the kids with me to the office. They immediately started to complain to my boss about all the horrible things they had done to each other. The boy pushed the girl into the swamp. The girl gave the boy cooties and played Hootie and the Blowfish on the jukebox. I began to think maybe these terrors belonged to my boss after all. I wanted to lock them in a room with a movie so I could get some peace and quiet. Does that mean I'm going to be a bad parent one day? I did take the girl to the bathroom to wash her hands, holding her over the sink so she could reach and making sure she used enough soap. Who knows what she got on her hands in that swamp?

From my office there's this great view of the swamp, a big green-blue bowl cutting into the landscape. Across the river, a giant sandbar juts out into the water. It looks like Jersey City created it as a parking lot, because it's covered with cars. From here, it doesn't look too hard to just walk across the barely submerged sand. I'd be in New Jersey in no time.

college, hobos, gasoline

2008-05-05T03:55:00.000-07:00

I decided to go back to school, and somehow managed to get a lease on the same house I used to rent in Ann Arbor. The place looked like shit when I got there, like it hadn't been painted since 1955. I guess it's been a while.

I was the first roommate to arrive, so this time I took the good room. There was a time when I would have been more fair about things, and waited until everyone arrived so we could all put in a bid for the rooms we wanted. Maybe I would have suggested a lottery or something. Whatever. I took the big room, with two windows and a view of the street and fewer stains on the carpet. Just as I finished setting up my room, putting up photos on the walls for once like I was really living there, I heard someone else dragging stuff in downstairs.

It was this girl I went to high school with. We got back in touch through facebook when they added that friend finder feature. It's great for stalking all those popular kids I never really talked to. They're all engaged now. I don't know why that bothers me. Anyway, this girl didn't get engaged. I think she went through some rough times, never managed to finish college the first time around. She must have been doing some weird drugs at some point, because she seems a little out of it these days. She smiles too much and is way too nice for a former popular girl. It freaks me out.

I went downstairs to say hi, and ran right in to this homeless dude who also happened to be this guy:

You might remember him from such films as Waitress and Ocean's 11. I kind of hope you don't.

My new roommate was guiding him into the house. I asked her what she was doing. It turns out the guy needed a place to stay, so she offered to let him stay with us. We had a quiet little talk outside. I told her no fucking way. She stopped smiling and stormed off, so I went inside, found homeless Eddie Jemison, and guided him back out of the house. Then I went and got groceries.

When I got back, the rest of my new roommates had already moved in all their stuff. And that crazy smiley girl was back, dousing my room in gasoline. She had a big can of it, the kind you use to buy gas for your lawnmower, and she was swinging it around so it soaked everything, my bed, my closet, the carpet, the ceiling. She walked out smiling and told me, you better be careful.

It was okay once it all dried. It didn't even smell that much of gasoline. Maybe she just filled the can with water and sprayed it around to scare me. Or maybe she thought water was flammable once you put it in a gas can. But just to be safe, I tried not to light any matches or have any open flames anywhere near my room.

Esther, bluegrass, pheasant

2008-05-04T17:19:00.000-07:00

My boss sent me to Kentucky on business and Esther Newberg invited me to dinner at her mountainside restaurant. We sat out back at an unsteady table, in between the lawn gnomes and the bluegrass. I guess we talked about books and ate some wild pheasant. She was nicer than I expected.

sushi, art, beer

2008-05-02T07:46:00.000-07:00

My best friend is dating a middle aged artist. He's foreign, although no one really knows what country he's from. He took us all out to a fancy restaurant that mixes Asian fusion with Tex-Mex. I had roasted pork sushi rolls, and they were delicious. Then we helped him set up an art installation in our apartment. I needed to use the bathroom, but someone was in there, so I went to the bar on the corner. They did some remodeling, and now they're a sushi lounge/art gallery/skating rink/bowling alley/beer garden. The hostess told me I couldn't pee there unless I bought some sushi. I didn't want any more sushi, so I held it, and she gave me a tour of their new facilities. The beer garden is lovely.