A week back our hometown during the Christmas holidays makes us all antsy enough to risk running into people we don't want to see to meet up for a few beers. Cheap beers. Or at least cheaper than we find in the cities where we now all live -- New York, Los Angeles, above, beyond.
Over beer and popcorn and nachos we talk about our 401k's, paying off car loans, promotions, grad school, and other adult-type things that are only interesting when they matter to your friends.
At one point, I apologize to Dana for bailing on skiing with him earlier that morning.
"Sorry I texted you at like, 5:30 in the morning, dude, but I didn't want you to drive all the way to my parents' house!" I say.
"Uh, nice try, Allison. You texted me at 6 a.m. when I was on my way to get gas to pick you up."
"No I didn't! I remember it was like, 5:21 a.m. or something!"
"No, it was totally like 6:08 a.m."
We both scramble for our phones to check the sent and received times, a frantic race to see who is right, because it matters.
"It's nice to see some things never change," says Jim.
Incidentally, we were both right.
Last week--
Me: Are you going to Allison's birthday thing on Tuesday night?
Amanda: What birthday thing?
Me: Did you read the email she sent? You were on the list of people she sent it to.
Amanda: That email was from that Allison?
Me: Yeah...about her birthday...
Amanda: Oh! I thought it was from you, so I didn't read it.
There's a 7-Eleven on 23rd Street that smells exactly like all the gas station convenience stores we used to stop at on the way home from skiing during weekends in high school.
At 17, I could barely make it to school for 7:30 a.m. Weekday mornings were a constant driver of the stomping and huffing that made my parents wonder why they ever decided they'd have babies who would eventually grow into teenagers.
But on winter weekends, I'd leap out of bed before the sun was up and drive to Dana's house -- a crucial 3 exits farther north on 93. He'd take his parents' Suburban and drive us to Okemo, Loon, Killington, Sunday River...wherever. If Jim were with us, he'd get shotgun. I'd doze in the backseat to Metallica or Dennis Leary's No Cure for Cancer. I don't think I've ever stayed awake more than twenty minutes into any roadtrip with Dana.
We'd probably make one of the first chairs up the mountain; later in the afternoon, we'd be on the last for sure, literally chasing daylight.
In my memories, our toes cracked simultaneously as we all wrenched our feet from nine hours in ski boots. We'd settle back into our positions in the Suburban, exhaustion being the only perceivable difference from the morning trip: same soundtrack, same darkness, same carsleep. During our days on the mountain, there was so much laughter and noise and gossip and boasting and dirty joke-telling, but the drives lulled us into near-silence.
Soon after we started home, Dana would pull into a gas station. He'd fill up the Suburban, and then we'd all get snacks for the road. I loved getting Diet Coke and cheese curls. Sometimes Rolos. The store would smell like old, burnt coffee -- too many leftover pots that had been brewed for the early ski crowds, perhaps.
The burnt coffee in the 7-Eleven on 23rd Street smells exactly the same, though early morning ski crowds are hundreds of miles away. On Saturday, I bought a bottle of seltzer water there and left craving cheese curls, wishing I had some Metallica on my iPod.
I'm kind of liking my microeconomics class, even though I'm pretty sure the majority of material is flying way, way above my head, but my textbook is ridiculous.
Here's an example of a passage that I would understand a whole lot more with a little simplification:
"The monopoly currently charges a price of Pm, produces Qm units of output, and earns profits described by the shaded region A. At the monopoly price and output, consumer surplus is given by triangle C."
Here's an example of a passage that is actually simplified:
"In effect, you are uncertain whether your boss is "honest" (will keep a promise) or "dishonest" (will break a promise).
Phew, thanks for those parenthetical definitions of honest vs. dishonest. That's definitely what I needed the most help with.
It started about a year ago, after I cut my hair to my chin. I walked into my favorite bodega on the corner of 11th Street and one of the owners -- the wife of a husband and wife team -- complimented me on my haircut.
Then, the woman at the laundromat where I drop off my clothes started remembering that I request allergy-free detergent.
On Friday, Caitlin and I were heading out when we ran into our super, Junior, and his grandson, Jay.
"Junior!" Caitlin shouted. "It's Allison's birthday!"
"Ahhh, happy birthday, Mama," said Junior. Jay asked me how old I was so he could give me "birthday punches."
On Saturday morning, as I was walking down 5th Avenue to head to class, Junior spotted me from about a block away and started singing Happy Birthday for all the neighborhood to hear.
This morning, I went into the bodega on 11th Street and the husband was behind the counter. He's never been as friendly to me as the wife; up until this morning, I never knew he even recognized me. But today, he exclaimed over the huge, colorful earrings I'm wearing. He asked me if I had made them, where I got them, and told me he thought they were so unique.
Now I can never leave, can I?
Tonight, I told my roommates I'd be making dinner, but I got home late from work and didn't really start things until about 8. I threw together one of my favorite easy recipes -- pasta with sauteed tomatoes and olives, crushed red pepper, and feta cheese (and leftover sausage for a bonus tonight).
By the time we ate, we were starving. The three of us wolfed down two heaping bowls each in about 7 minutes. We're talking the most unladylike forkfuls of pasta ever shoved down throats this side of 5th Avenue.
Finished, we uttered contented sighs, and perhaps a few satisfied burps.
"That was sooo good," Caitlin said.
"Yeah," said Amanda, "I wonder what it tasted like."
Here's a list of people who can get away with calling me "baby":
1. The Russian guy who runs the egg sandwich cart on Wall St.
Here's a list of people who can get away with calling Amanda "baby":
1. Her Danish friend, Sophie.
Saturday night found me at a bar in the East Village discussing W.H. Auden with some friends. Ugh, how disgustingly New York-cliche, right? Stay with me.
My friend's friend Zack said he had always loved the poem "Funeral Blues," which practically has a supporting role in the movie Four Weddings and a Funeral. He never realized, though, that Auden was gay and that the poem is about a male lover. Back when he was in Catholic high school, Zack's teacher, a priest, changed all the pronouns from "he" to "she," so it sounded as though the poem were written about a woman. Either that, or the teacher didn't feel comfortable reading Auden's words about a man.
The injustice of it all! The hetero-normalcy imposed upon Catholic schoolchildren!
"Oh, man," I said, all irate, standing up for anyone who's ever been repressed and even ol' dead Auden himself. "That's totally like how on American Idol, when the contestants sing songs, they change all the pronouns so that you never hear a man sing about a man, or a woman sing about a woman."
And there you have it. From W.H. Auden to American Idol in one simple step.
For the record, they do switch the pronouns on American Idol and it makes me really angry, and I do think there's a legitimately scary message about that deep down in case anyone's looking for something to boycott.
By the way, if you've never read "Funeral Blues," here's your chance:
Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.
Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He is Dead.
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.
He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.
The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the woods;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.
-W.H. Auden
My favorite roommate, Amanda, bought a Wii. Just kidding! She's not my favorite, I just have to suck up to her so she keeps letting me play!
Along with the Wii came an old school Nintendo suite of Super Mario Bros. 1, 2, and 3. Mario and I have been getting reacquainted, to say the very least. Tonight I found myself resisting the urge to throw the controller across the room with an adolescent fervor that has become all too familiar now that I've been playing A LOT of video games. That's the very same adolescent fervor that shattered a water glass into a thousand pieces while I played Wii tennis all by myself last Friday night.
My neighbors must think we've turned our little three-bedroom, closetless abode into a sorority house (my apologies to Scott, Julie, and their 3-year-old! To the dude who plays his guitar in the room that shares one of my bedroom wall, screw you). Shrieks and giggles and grrrrrrs emanate from our living room, but it's like the nerd equivalent of your standard pillow fight. It's just the three of us in sweatpants testing our Wii fitness ages or trying to remember that trick in level 3-2 of Mario 1 where you keep jumping on the turtle to get a million extra lives.
Speaking of which, there are a couple things about my reunion with Mario that I've been thinking about.
First of all, I feel like every time I use my brain power to remember how to warp to level 8 from level 4-2 or which character to use in Mario 2, I worry that like, all the irregular Spanish verb conjugations or Geometry formulas flee the premises for good. Because I remember like, a lot of how to play these games. A creepy amount. How do I remember this crap? WHY?
It's also funny playing from an adult perspective. I'm not in my parents' basement with my mom shouting down the stairs to remind me to do my homework. So now, these warp zones are almost funny to me. Why warp all the way to the last level when I can stay up til 3 a.m. slowly beating the game at my own leisure?
In summary, being an adult and playing video games rules. Although, I'd trade it all in to come up from my parents' basement, do my fifth grade math homework, and have my mom French braid my hair before I went to bed at 9 p.m.
Lately, and in the coming weeks, I can be found:
-Running outside
-Eating and drinking outside
-On Amtrak/Greyhound so that I may spend time in my favorite outside place, Salisbury Beach
-On the A train to the beach in the Rockaways
-Under the big tree and/or stalking cute dogs in Prospect Park
-Not wasting away in front of my computer for any more hours than necessary, i.e. slacking on the ol' blog.
The operative word here is "outside," people. It's summertime -- what are you doing inside anyway?!
I can also be found at the 5 Resolutions Blog, where I've written two guests posts:
Moments of Body Zen, Part I: My Thyroid, Myself
Moments of Body Zen, Part II: A Hamster off its Wheel
Happy summer.
