Agonizing Misery

Personal statements are not fun or easy to write. It is not easy to represent yourself on paper. I mean, what are colleges looking for? Might it be my charm? My devotion to the Spatula God? My bizarre phobia about e-mail? What elements should I tell them to make them want me in their program? It feels like an academic popularity contest or something. How should I wear my hair so that the most universities will vote for me?

Sure, I write about myself all the time on this blog. But it’s not the final word about me. And you may not have noticed this, but I occasionally obscure my true feelings about issues through exaggeration, blurring the line between sarcasm and sincerity, talking about events not emotions, etc. That’s because I am like a lovely, erratic butterfly: try to pin me down and you just STAB me through the heart and kill me, to be left on display like some sad, stiff relic. Okay, so I’m being dramatic, but I honestly don’t believe anyone has such a static personality that it can be summed up in 500 words or whatever. (Oops! Did I just undermine my entire choice of lifelong pursuit by suggesting that words can’t capture a real person? Well, no, there’s definitely wiggle room. a) My characters, however round, and however complex their story arcs might be, are not attempted representations of “real” people I’ve met, out in the world. b) You know how some people can draw figures and faces that look real but can’t make them look like the particular persons they’re trying to represent? It could be like that. c) I never said I don’t believe a person can’t be summed up in a novel, and I want to write novels much more than I ever wanted to write short stories. d) Weren’t you listening? I was just telling you that I am erratic and not static. I can change my mind about representing people in prose whenever I want and still be consistent with my statement that I can’t be adequately described in a personal statement, let alone a blog entry! Read up on logical traps, Grasshopper. Bwahahahaha! And before you point out the “But something has to be the objective truth so you have to be wrong at some point in that cycle” bit, please reflect that I am pretty sure I am inventing my world through observation of and beliefs regarding it.)

Anyway, the point is: writing something about myself is limiting of myself. If I say I am untidy, aren’t I doing injustice to the times I feel like I love organizing and cleaning things? Okay, bad example. Haha, actually I do like to clean sometimes–it can be so satisfying. And organizing, well, it’s like a mix between a math problem and a creative project, sometimes–both of which, of course, I love to do. If I say I am an English person does that mean I can’t be a math person? If I say I love solitude, how can I represent the times I love to meet new people? If I counter everything I like with an opposite example in the essay like I’ve just been doing, how can I show those inflexible parts of me like vegetarianism and procrastination? Ugh. Ugh. Yeeaugh. Blauugh. Maybe if I don’t get into any MFA programs, I can at least convert some admissions officers to Spatulism.

By the way: to anyone wondering about comments (yes, Dad and Grampy, this means you), all you have to do to add a comment to, say, the most recent post, is to click on the link that says “_ Comments” (_ being “No” or a number)  near the bottom right of said post. Or you can click on the title of the post, and then there will be a comments box at the bottom of the page. That’s it. So there’s no need to be shy…or (ahem, Dad) to comment repeatedly on the “Who is this?” page.

At Maura’s.

My cell phone doesn’t work here, of course. Today I was supposed to do a lot of things that I ended up not doing. I know: you’re shocked, right? Anyway I am just checking in. What I meant to say at the end of that last post, about verbosity: I will probably be less verbose on this blog in the nearish future.

A profusion of pies…

Oh, pie. This morning, when I got up (around 9:30), Tara said “Oh hooray, someone to play with!” or somesuch and I could see that we were definitely going to play: a pile of apples peeled, sliced, and sugared sat on the counter. Immediately we threw together some tart dough (enough for 4 tarts, or 2 pies with top and bottom crusts…plus a little extra) and put it in the fridge. (And, of course, there was tea–Ceylon.) We then worried about the consequences of making pies with tart crust. Well, we said, we’ll make one with normal crust and one with tart crust, and we’ll play with the rest of the tart dough. Fortunately on her manicure run she’d gotten (lots!) of extra apples. So we started that…and then we ended up with so many apples and so much crust (of both kinds) that we ended up makingthree pies (two with tart dough, one with pie crust), plus seven tartlets (in a mini-muffin-cups pan) and one largish, err, thing. After we put together two of the pies we got mischievous and played with the spices…I wish I’d been just a tad more ambitious, but I chickened out at the last second and didn’t add ginger. But we definitely made someclovey and allspicey additions to the filling for the last pie (Not to mention a tadbit of–oops, secret ingredient! Haha, wouldn’t you like to know?), and to the filling for the tartlets and…thing. We made exactly one tartlet per person (Richard was assigned the largeish thing): Stephanie, Nicole, me, Tara, Madison, Victoria, and a friend of Madison’s (Ana? Anna?) who was over. The sad part was that Nicole didn’t end up getting hertartlet. Someone ate it. {I hereby curse, in the name of His Spatulatory Glory, any person who did knowingly eat both his/her and Nicole’s tartlet, thus depriving Nicole of her rightful clovey due: May he/she be irrepressibly flatulent for one week and one day.}

Anyway we’re going to bring two of the pies (the beautiful, beautiful one with normal filling and normal pie crust, and the experimental but disappointingly flat one with tart crust and doctored filling) toGrampy’s birthday, both of which we expect to be cut into, one of which will go home with Grampy , and the other of which will remain at Bill’s house. (They can duke it out over who gets to keep the one that has more left.) One will remain at Tara’s–the one with the disappointingly collapsed tart-crust top. (I’m sure it will still taste delicious though.) That was two days of major cooking in a row for me–can you tell I was missing a kitchen? That’s the problem with living out of your car–it’s hard to fit counters and ovens and refrigerator space and pots and pans and rolling pins andstovetops and sinks into your back seat. After that I’m going to Grammy and Grampy’s house tomorrow. Shout out to Dad and Caryn in London, I’m so envious. I bet they’re drinking really good tea, right now! Hmph.

P. S. I miss Connie :’(.

P. P. S. I know I’ve been prolific lately…in posts, not just pies. I kind of hope for you guys’ sake that you’re not bored/unoccupied enough to actually read every post…but goodness, if I hope that then why on earth am I posting so much? Wow, I just typed a sentence containing both “goodness” and “why on earth” while keeping a straight face.

Having to put up with my own melodrama is exhausting sometimes…

So I was about to settle down to work on my personal statement, and then I thought oh I’d better take a shower first (the logic of procrastination), so I ran out in my pajamas to get a fresh shirt out of the car. Then I closed the trunk and looked up and saw that I had closed the door of Tara’s house. This might not seem so bad until you hear that at Tara’s house, they don’t use the top locks; they lock the door handles. And there I was outside, looking at the shut door, wearing pajamas with no pockets (i.e. no phone) and my arms full of a fresh shirt and underwear. It occurred to me that Nicole had run out to the mall a bit ago, and that Tara had gone to meet Richard for lunch (M and V are at school, of course).

I was already planning my attack on the house (Is the back door locked? Any windows open? Any windows easy to break in through from the outside? Can I find a credit card-ish shaped thing to slide between the door frame and the door where the handle locks (the easiest kind of lock to bypass/pick)? That window looks promisingly easy, could I pull the screen off without damaging it…?) And then I walked up and checked the door and even though it was pulled to, the lock hadn’t quite clicked in, and I pushed the door open and stepped inside. Phew. The Spatula God must have been watching.

Also: tea. Mmm.

A New Hope…

Da da da duuuuuun, duun, da da da daaaaat, duun, da da da daaaaaat, dun, da da da duuuun…

And the Star Wars theme ushers in my new phone. Poor phone. It deserves better than constant comparisons to a phone of legend, a phone that set a standard that can never be matched: the phone that was chewed on by two different dogs, dropped and stepped on countless times, even run over by a car and miraculously returned to me once. And yet by deliberately buying a phone that apes the general aspect and functionality of that legendary phone, I have forced the comparison to remain foremost in my mind in every interaction.

In other news, I made it safely to the haven of Tara’s house, where a fantabulous stuffed pepper awaited me. Mmm! I think I shocked poor Victoria by falling like a ravenous beast on her freshly baked cookies. I know I shocked Madison by tapping on the window of the room she was in (the doorbell wasn’t working), because she screamed and leaped out of her chair very convincingly.

Earlier today, between trips to different T-Mobile stores, I was trying to express my frustration without letting it affect my driving/sanity/etc. Note that gnashing one’s teeth is an excellent way to go, but even better is eating an apple–it’s just like gnashing your teeth, except it tastes better, distracts you from what originally aroused your ire, and is better for your image if you get caught at it.

Also: there is a book I just finished. I didn’t bring any books with me on this trip on purpose, so I wouldn’t sink into them, but I ended up bringing one by accident (it was hidden in a pocket that I swear I didn’t check, but I don’t like that one anyway), and then by pure serendipity a bookcrossing book came to me…but it was weird. I can’t say I recommend it. Body of Knowledge. Err..yeah, don’t recommend it. It did have a compelling quality to it, though, almost hypnotic.

In other other news: I think the splint’s off for good! Yay!

The Big Apple.

I ended up staying here two nights instead of one (New York is like that, haha), a lot of it because I had a good place to sleep and good company–Clyde! Clyde is awesome. Not just a little. (For any of you who might not know: One of my dad’s college friends, who lives in New York. Has two kids, Liza and Charlie, that he loves like nothing else! Also has a cat. Works in real estate–sort of, I’ve never figured out exactly how.) The day I got in he ran out to the grocery store with me so that I would be able to make dinner (he had a meeting, which turned out to be later than he thought so he had salad with me), made sure I’d be able to make tea in the morning, made me feel very much at home–even turned on the light in the bedroom I’d be staying in so that I didn’t have to bumble around looking for the light switch! Not to go all gushy, but I was really touched. I mean, it only occurred to me that I was driving into his town that day (originally I wasn’t going to stay in NY at all), so I called him on the edge of New Jersey and said, Hey, can I crash on your couch? But even on such short notice I got a big warm welcome, and I really appreciated it. And then last night even when one of the gods was set against us and I didn’t end up meeting up with him at the right time due to certain problems that were no one’s fault, he went out to a second dinner with me (the first one was with Liza, I was supposed to join them) at a really REALLY delicious italian restaurant where I had a mixed mushroom and sheep cheese pizza. That pizza was more like the pizza I ate in Italy than any other pizza in my life, it was amazing!

In the less good news, I have lost my cell phone. That was very annoying for a period of three hours yesterday, but I’m not going to think about it all again and write up every second of my misery, because I slept so well that YAY I’m already over it. In the lemons-to-lemonade camp, that phone (::sob! I liked it::) had been run over by a car before, and the back never fit again, though I held onto it until I lent my phone for thirty seconds to a Certain Person (5′7″, curly hair, answers to “Jessie”); the back mysteriously vanished before this Person handed the phone back*. And the battery had to be held in with your fingers while you were talking, and the phone itself had to be kind of wedged into a compartment of my purse so the battery didn’t fall out…I’ll miss it, but I did need a new one anyway.

Tonight, on to Tara’s house! At least she had a couple days’ notice that I would be in town, though I didn’t exactly tell her which day I’d be in RI because I didn’t know…er, sorry, Tara. That was complete apostrophe because I don’t think she’ll ever read this blog, but you never know. I am lucky that my friends and family are such great people that they seem to actually be happy to hear that a wandering vagabond (my Bubbie’s words, referring to my plans: “Before you start wandering like a vagabond…” (or something like that)–Haha, I like it) will be stopping in to take advantage of their hospitality. It was really great to see Clyde and (for a little bit) Liza, and I can’t wait to see Tara and Richard and the two younger ones!

*Not mad, just enjoying bringing it up.

My expectations were too high…?

I didn’t think it was unreasonable to expect that the shower head would come above my chin.

Things I have turned out to be a sucker for:

1. Those little brown signs with white arrows on them that say “Historic District” or “Historical Downtown (insert city/town here)“. I can’t seem to pass them without at least thinking “Ooh, I bet that’s worth stopping at!”…and then I usually do it. Of course, what they mean by “Historic Downtown Wherever” is, “Hey tourists, we’ve been here longer than 50 years! Come spend money!” Well, it usually also means that the town/city is studded with signs about local hero soldiers/captains/generals that died for the Confederacy. Or, “On this spot, the $#%!@ Union treacherously used x underhanded tactics to sneak up on and murder the fine young men that fought here for the sainted Confederacy.” (Don’t ask me how a rebel government can be sainted.) I’m not complaining, I really do end up liking stopping in these little towns. It’s just when I take a step back I think, Geez, why do I like it so much? Fortunately I can let that bit of me chew on that question while the rest of me just enjoys it.

2. Cotton fields.

3. The word “Chesapeake.”

I am currently in Norfolk, VA, trying to decide whether to take pretty coastal 13 and bypass all of the urban areas, or to just go into DC and kind of dally around. Much as I’d like to see DC again (and much as that’s the route of Lots of Hostels), I find myself leaning towards the coastal route. Now I have to drink my tea*. Excuse me.

*Yay for the chain Port City Java! They have SUCH good tea, they always have honey and milk actually out to put in it, and they always have free wireless! They even have inexpensive all-day egg and cheese sandwiches, to get me those important B vitamins. I’ll be sad when I pass the franchise’s domain.

Let me take a moment…

To gloat that I have a tea habit and not a coffee habit, unlike Some People. My tea habit can be hard to live with, sure…but tea at most places usually costs less than half of the price of the simplest cup of coffee available. They don’t seem to charge differently for good tea or bad tea; whether Numi or Floor Sweepings, you’ll find that it’s between $1.12 and $1.82 pretty much everywhere. And you get the free wireless just as the four-dollar coffee crowd does. Bwahahaha!

Wilmington, NC is very cool. An excellent river walk, cute cute little town and excellent to browse around*.

Okay, there is a little bit of trouble in paradise. My plans are slightly thrown off by the general dearth of hostels along the mid-atlantic coast; I didn’t just want to drive up I-95 (and I haven’t been), I wanted to take lovely coastal roads from hostel to hostel, and make my leisurely way up the coast, not spending much money at all. (Please smirk away from the computer screen. Thanks.) So far this has been working, but it may be that southern hostel hospitality. Turns out for the next several states the hostels are mostly inland or closed for the season. Or both. I’m talking hours inland. ::sigh:: I don’t want to skip the coast and hop I-95 for 7.5 hours to DC hostels. I don’t want to drive more than 4 hours a day period, and I don’t want to end up blundering up the coast and sleeping in my car for days, sneaking into freezing public beach showers so I don’t reek. Also, much as I don’t mind driving at night, I don’t want to do that on this trip (and haven’t been) because I want to see the places I’m driving through. That’s kind of the point. Also, libraries will be closed tomorrow, pretty much no matter where I drive (except maybe college towns, where I could sneak into college libraries looking student-y–not hard; harder is finding a college town on this part of the coast, though I’ve passed through several).

Fortunately I have tea. Very good tea. Numi Organic Breakfast, which is their blend of Indian teas (Assam, Ceylon, Darjeeling…mmm), and I have actual honey and milk to put in it, and wireless at this coffee tea shop. I am going to sit for a bit, and pretend there is no trance music on, and try to pare things off of my plans so they are slim enough to squeeze into reality, without lopping off anything I would really regret later. (Figuring out what I would regret paring off is the key here, I think.) You had better not be reading this thinking, Oh, she’ll post her solution in a bit then–because I’m pretty sure there won’t be anything that any normal person would recognize as a solution. I am pretty sure it will come (to me) piecemeal and gappy, in spontaneous surges over the next couple days.

*What are you talking about? I have never heard of this alleged “used book store,” let alone gotten stuck there for nearly an hour.

Charleston; Also, the Whims of the Spatula God

So I haven’t exactly been logging every mile or everything, but…some days I do pay attention, because I’ve got my handy mapquest printouts* and my need to know exactly how long till I get there (I must have bugged the hell out of my parents asking how much longer, how much longer, how much longer?! on car trips), and on more than one occasion now I’ve had the happy but bewildering experience of reaching my destination more than twenty miles ahead of when I should have**. I have, naturally, put this down to the fact that the Spatula God is on my side***. What else would it be? But today, the Spatula God must have had other things on His mind****, because even though I left in plenty of time, He didn’t do His usual divine finessing of, say, traffic, directions that my car tends to drift into that help me rather than hurting me, etc., and so I missed the first five minutes of one of my tv shows. Sigh. Note that it is Vampire Friday, the only day that I like any shows on enough to actually follow them and there are three, and two of them are vampire shows. That means Moonlight at nine on CBS (To me an unlikely candidate for a channel to host a vampire show. It’s turning out pretty mushy-romancey, but it’s kinda well written, with some terrible puns (not just vampire suck puns, although those are rampant), interesting plotlines (I liked episode two’s), and, er, vampires…yeah, I think that’s why I’m hooked, too.) And Blood Ties at 11 on the Lifetime channel (Even more unlikely channel for a vampire show, to my mind. Right now I like the tension between Mike the cop and his partner Kate, because Mike is witholding all of the paranormal tips he’s getting via Vicky and (to his chagrin) Henry, and Kate knows it.). Yes, there’s a third show. Yes, I like it very much, and I think it is very cute and funny, and I am only going to say it once Avatar. Comments that refer to it by name will be moderated.
My favorite line from vampire friday:

Vicki: They have no school records, immunizations, library cards, they’re very sketchy people and probably part of the murder case, blabbity blah de blah, okay I don’t remember her line but it’s the next line I like.

Henry: Neither do I. That doesn’t make me a killer.

[Vicki looks at him. He recalls having impressed on her in previous episodes how very dangerous and vampiry he is, specifically how he's, er, killed people.]

Henry: Bad example.

Another excellent line, this one Mick from Moonlight: “You had to piss off an arms dealer.”
On to Charleston. Charleston is nothing at all like Savannah. That probably doesn’t strike many people as too strange, but, never having visited either one, and having had only the vaguest impression of either of them as “famousish Southern cities,” they actually were linked in my mind as kind of similar until last night at, oh, nineish, when I actually hit Charleston. Today I noted that the look, feel, layout, even smell of Charleston were almost diametrically opposite to Savannah. Savannah was a wide, green city with lots of shade, a feel of “young art” (probably due to the college of design there), and not a lot of traffic in the middle of the day. Smelled cool and damp, woodsy. Charleston was a plaster-and-brick-homes-preservation-paradise, and sure it had parks, but they were on the water, and the streets had a kind of bare pastel feel that was a lot nicer than I just made it sound, and there was not much shade except in the (delineated) parks (which, for example, did not spill out into squares, or line the business roads, etc., as they did in Savannah). True, an arty feel, but it was kind of a static, “established art” feel–one gallery owner told me there were sixty galleries within a short distance of his. (I didn’t buy anything! Aren’t you proud! And it’s not because I was able to resist going into any of the galleries, either. It might have had something to do with the fact that every item I coveted really greedily turned out to cost something like twelve thousand dollars, though. Still I deserve a little credit–I didn’t even think about going to the bank and talking someone into a tiny little loan that would, say, cover some hundred and eighty two paintings each worth about twelve thousand dollars.) Lots of midday traffic; also it smelled (pleasantly) briny.

I’m now in Wilmington (Vermont. No, Delaware. No, no, North Carolina, obviously. Ahem. I am not a masochist. About 4 hours of driving a day is my limit. Especially as I have not been listening to my ipod (::cries::), which has led to the happy circumstance of not being earwormed to death (only to insensibility) for the last couple days. What I have been doing is talking into a digital voice recorder. Yes, talking to myself. Oh, shut up.)

*These are usually conned out of a lady at the front desk of a library, and I do it with such style that she thinks it was her idea. This is, of course, for her benefit as well as mine–she feels like she’s helped someone out (and she has!–just maybe less on her own initiative and maybe not as much in her own way as she thought). My gig is to wander in, looking all lost and helpless, and ask ever so innocently for directions to the next city from the lady at the front desk. The key is that not many people actually know driving routes by heart, even to major cities within two hours. They inevitably look up the mapquest (never expedia, interestingly enough) and then instead of letting me write it down, even though I have pen and paper, they print it out for me for free, whatever library policy actually is. Yay for Southern hospitality! Seriously though, there are some very nice ladies working at libraries here. And no I’m not going in to read books all day and ignore the cool cities I’m passing through; I just use the free wireless to, say, update blogs, etc. Note that I don’t look up the directions and write them down even though I have my computer out and am on the internet using the free wireless that I specifically came to the library to get. That would be a pain. Much better to finesse printed sheets out of unsuspecting (and very nice) persons.

**I am perfectly serious about this.

***He is one of the traffic gods.

****I’m pretty sure he’s been watching the new Mr. Deity episode on a loop ever since it came out, and is currently lying puddled and hysterical on the floor of his Cirrus Walkup.