new-town twang

Wilmington is far harder to grasp than St. Croix Falls.  Not metaphysically -- I don't want anyone thinking I'm calling St. Croix simple -- but as far as finding my way around, I'm a little more intimidated.  I recognize highways 1, 2, 4, 7, 13, 95, 141, 295, and 495 (all within a 5-minute radius of our house) and I can use them to get from point A to point B and back home again.  I remember the major landmarks, like Kohl's and Best Buy, and I'm getting more comfortable pulling U-turns to get on the right side of the highway.  (Delaware's traffic planners decided it was safer to do that than to cut turn lanes through the divider for every store and strip mall.  The only "no U-ies" sign I've seen applied just to trucks, and then only because the road isn't wide enough at that point for them to get all the way around.  I've never seen, or executed, so many legal U-turns in my entire existence.)

But I've been fabricating errands to check off my list just so I don't get stuck in the house, intimidated, claustrophobic... insane.  It's definitely harder these days to make myself take the first step and make a phone call or visit the county information center (which I haven't done here yet), but an outside observer probably would note my initiative.  Yesterday I got my Delaware driver's license and then, remembering a Starbucks gift card I got for graduation, spent the afternoon at a Starbucks very near my house drinking mocha frappuccino on an empty stomach and cranking out job applications.  On my list today is to make appointments with all the various healthcare practitioners I haven't seen since starting college (in some cases a mild exaggeration) now that I have insurance again!  And then go check out furniture and building stores like Habitat for Humanity's ReStore for good deals and ideas on finishing the basement.  Thomas and I have put together a pretty cool plan for a studio apartment on one half of the basement downstairs, and while this morning I woke up to a wave of anxiety about waking up underground every day, I'm excited to have my own space.  Besides, I'm anxious about everything these days, and not without reason.

As you may have realized by now, I'm feeling less good about my life in general than I have been so far since graduation; but I'm working hard to turn my anxiety into kinetic energy, to work out a lifestyle I like that fits into Wilmington, DE -- more to come on that front, I'm sure.

But the thing that has endeared me to Delaware the most so far is the twang: as it turns out, Wilmington is a little bit South.  From my limited experience of both, it's somewhat more clipped than the Arkansan tongue and considerably more clipped than Joel's thinly veiled West-Bank-New-Orleans drawl.  And as we all know, I love a good new-town twang.  The LCS workers I met at the ice cream social last week said they could definitely hear a little bit of Minnesota in my speech, so I've got a bit of work to do.  But it has been a week since then...

The ladies at my mom's work call me "sweetie" and tell me I look exactly like my mom and I'm so pretty, and the way they talk sounds like they mean every word.  Businessmen hold umbrellas and doors and lines for me, looking at me like I might be a half-real visitor from a softer world -- yesterday at the DMV a clerk took my case even though he was only supposed to take care of in-state renewals and address changes, and throughout the process he became warmer and warmer with me, a little shyer, never starting a conversation but by the time I left he seemed almost fond of me.  For no reason except my "Live Foreign Birth" certificate, my New York driver's license, and the fact that I said, "Yes, please" to everything: would I like to be an organ donor, would I like to register to vote while I'm here, do I wear contacts or glasses to drive...  And the photo ID guy smiled real big when he called my name and I appeared almost instantly.  He took a good long pleasant look at my face and said, "Well, you've sure got good hearing!"

It feels unusual, for people to respond so strongly to the polite but positive energy I'm carrying with me these days -- or to the Oregon-plated Golf's tiny turn radius, perfect for U-turns, which for some reason I'm sure the guy in the black SUV who held the door for me at Starbucks took note of.  When I mentioned it to my mom, she suggested that a pretty, educated, polite person my age who hasn't lost hope is a rare breed in these parts, in the eye of the metropolitan hurricane that forms this part of the Eastern Seaboard.  Speaking of hurricanes, we saw not one weatherperson and hardly a mention of Delaware on the Weather Channel's coverage of Hurricane Irene last weekend -- even though we're closer to the coast than D.C., tucked in right under Philly, and exactly on the way from Virginia to New York City.  Really, I'm not surprised that some people might have forgotten about themselves.

Now if that energy could get me a job stat, that would be ideal.  It's definitely a different cup of tea trying to find employment in a sprawling city like this than in a small, concise Wisconsin town where I can walk into every shop on Main Street, start a conversation with the proprietor or clerk, and ask if they know of anyplace that's hiring, or anybody that needs work done.  In Wilmington it would take me longer to get to a place I could walk into for a chat than it did to do a whole block on St. Croix's Main Street.  This is also not a bikes, co-ops, farmer's markets, and internet cafés kind of city overall, which means my sense of community is going to need a makeover.  Toto, we're not in the Midwest anymore.

...Toto, we're not in a small, private, allegedly "green" liberal arts college in the Midwest anymore.  The alumni network hardly even reaches this far east.

On a completely unrelated note, Alex sets off for India today, four days later than planned.  He'll be gone for a year, studying Hindi in school for a semester and then traveling around doing who knows what.  Not that I see him more than every summer anyway, but it feels far.  I guess I'm sending a lot of energy today to help the plane get safely across the globe.

rock me like a hurricane

So, I forgot to mention the important clincher to my apocalyptic inklings: an earthquake, the first significant shaking of the earth to be felt in Delaware in decades.  (I actually didn't feel it -- the fitting rooms in Christiana Mall's H&M didn't move me...  But everyone else in the mall was freaking out, the food court emptied out so fast you wouldn't believe it, and nobody's cell phone worked immediately afterward.  No one is quite sure why.)

And now here we are, the entire eastern seaboard holding its breath for the category 3 Hurricane Irene (which should really only be a tropical storm by the time it hits us).  We're currently almost one half hour into the twenty-four-hour hurricane warning extended to the Wilmington area, and New Jersey is being evacuated.  Two nights ago I was Facebook chatting my friend Zach in Norfolk, Virginia, who just moved there to start teaching and is worried about flooding.  "I really have no idea what to expect," he wrote, and he's not the only one.  I realize that I am unique in having vivid, if perhaps skewed, recollections of the category 4 Hurricane Georges that hit St. Croix back in 1998.  Yes, I do historically find myself fascinated in disasters of all kinds, but I unarguably survived on the Bunsen-burned Spam we ate and lived to see an annoyingly resilient cactus torn from the roots in our backyard.  There was one moment I got scared, when we let our German Shepherd mix, Baloo, out to pee during the temporary calm in the eye of the storm, and she took off.  But I find myself yet again this time around assuaging my sister with scientific details, statistics, and backyard streaking during teaser rainstorms.  Meanwhile I'm feeling in the pit of my stomach a roiling thrill and a maddening calm, while the popular radio station broadcasts on-air calls from women named Irene, and a playlist of Irene-themed songs, The Scorpions' Rock You Like A Hurricane, and Save Tonight by Eagle Eye Cherry.

Swanson Household Hurricane Task List 2011:
- Buy and stash candles, water, and non-electricity-dependent food items
- Assemble phone list for my dad's congregation
- Charge cell phones
- Update blog before potential indefinite internet/electricity fail
- Shower...?

On another note, I've been running around with my mom for the past couple of days.  As I see it, the CEL should really push mom-shadowing, or even just my-mom-shadowing; because she really is quite a capable woman and I'm fascinated at how she gets around and gets everything done without totally going over the edge.  Also she's just great in general.  The other night she took me to an ice cream social at a church up on the university end of town, where I met a lot of the ladies from Lutheran Community Services, her office's parent organization.  Some of them were asking me about my plan.  "What are you doing now?" they asked at first.  I told them, straight up, that I'm trying to meet people and get acquainted with the area.  "But what's your plan?" they pressed.  I felt that old anxious irritation welling up in my chest but took a deep breath (the way my mom does when she's answering a difficult question) and said, "I don't know."  I continued to explain that I have a lot of interests but I'm not sure yet how they're going to be expressed, and they noted that I can't really do anything sociology-related if I don't go into further studies...  For the most part I managed not to get sucked into that WHAT ARE YOU DOING WITH YOUR LIFE anxiety, or even resentment toward that anxiety, but the conversation did get me thinking: where am I going?  I think it lit a healthy fire under my ambition, which I'm starting to stoke now.

So the next day I got up at 6:40 (my alarm went of at 6 sharp) and rode the bus into the city with my mom to work at LCS's F.A.I.T.H. Center.  The F.A.I.T.H. Center takes appointments with people who need some money to get out of a tight spot (like a final notice for electricity or eviction) after extenuating circumstances, and draws from several different funds to write a check just to bring financial survival within reach.  I was interested to note that a family can only come to the F.A.I.T.H. Center for help once every 7 years, which changes the service relationship and raises client accountability -- because they have to demonstrate that they can, overall, manage their own finances and maintain a certain standard of living, with a roof over their head and lights on.  So I got to sit in on a few interviews and get a feel for the kind of work they do.  While I was tired by the end of the day, I wasn't overwhelmed.  I think this could be a type of service I could do, although I still feel like a prim little white girl who doesn't know how to talk about the things that really matter.  The kind of girl who went to school with the man in the suit on the New Castle County government page, the man who looks so out-of-place on a computer screen in a downtown office that I want to punch him, that he could never fathom the kind of people who use his page as a resource.  I can almost guarantee that he has never spoken with any of the people my mother and her coworkers spoke with throughout the day, and that, like me, he wouldn't know how if he met them on a city bus, which he would never ride in the first place.

My mom is also good at grocery shopping, although I think she got excited to have me along because I may have coerced her into buying a few things she didn't really need, that I probably wouldn't even buy if I was grocery shopping on my own.  She did say, when I was waxing poetic about Greek yogurt and fresh produce, "That's the kind of thing you can eat if there are only two of you.  I'd really like to fit that into our lifestyle, but it's just not practical."  But she looked for it anyway.

She also asked me, after a decently-dressed gray-haired man in glasses and a nametag sidled up to me with an umbrella at the bus stop in Rodney Square, "So was that guy trying to pick you up?"  He caught my eye as he was approaching, and then positioned himself so that I was blocking him from her line of sight and said slyly, "I can bring my umbrella over here I guess."  He asked me a few questions about which bus I was waiting for and where it goes, and what time it was supposed to show up.  Having never taken this particular bus before, I couldn't really answer, and my mom mostly could, so the entire thing turned into a mild fiasco he was probably regretting the entire time.  "I was gonna ask you that!" I replied, and we laughed about it.  "I get a lot more attention when I go out with you," she remarked on the walk home when a neighbor waved from his truck as he passed.  I was just thinking everyone was friendly, although I think I misrecognized a guy on the bus and talked to him as though we'd met when, in retrospect, I'm not sure we actually did.  Also, on our early-morning run today Maria and I saw the mythical cute guys in our neighborhood all on their way out to highway 4.  So there is hope.

My dad came home this morning from an EKG and announced, "I have a beautiful heart!"  Most people who have met him could easily say this figuratively, but the physiological confirmation of this fact proved startlingly joyful.  He described the feeling of watching his own heart beating on a medical monitor, of watching the valves contract and the blood pump in and out on its way through the rest of his body.  I thought of the time I went to a fertility doctor for my first pelvic exam, and he showed me a live ultrasound of my reproductive system.  It's pretty sweet to watch your own body working.  It's a pretty incredible piece of work, if I do say so myself.  Eric once scoffed at intelligent design because of how often the body breaks and fails, but there's something so beautiful about that delicacy that I can't really disbelieve that it all makes some kind of sense.

square one

It's been an intense week.  I'm sitting down for maybe the first time since the last time I wrote, definitely the first time I've sat down in front of a computer.  Fortunately I don't get any emails anymore now that I've let my stolaf.edu password expire...

A week ago today I was taking a break from "packing" to have lunch and a much-needed nap with Eric.  After having guests and a packed schedule for five or so days Ann and I were short on sleep, which is a precarious way to plunge into a cross-country road trip.  On the other hand, I got almost nothing done the day before we left -- partially as a result of my afternoon-long break and partially as a result of my psychological hang-ups associated with packing and moving.

Let's talk about it.  I hate moving as it is, despite my life-long history of 2-year engagements; and when we're talking a permanent departure from the site of one of the healthiest, happiest summers of my life, the issue doesn't really subside.  I also inherited the legendary Swanson packing style, which basically consists of spreading all items around every square inch of house in order to best understand how each item will fit into the boxes, bins, and bags lining the periphery.  Outsiders find this debacle quite baffling, and in this case there were more than a few outsiders hovering around wondering what I thought I was doing at midnight before an early departure spreading my belongings all over the house.  In the end I fit my life (except a standing fan, a set of wire storage racks, and a decent amount of condiments and fresh produce) comfortably into the back of the Golf.  My most debilitating hang-up was that my CD changer is in the trunk underneath my storage space, and anyone who knows anything knows that you can't set off on a road trip with an empty CD changer.  Unfortunately I somehow had managed to deem this necessity "frivolous," so I kept on putting it off even though the fact that I had put together 0 out of 6 CD soundtracks was keeping me from putting any of my many items into boxes and bags...  The moral of the story: be up-front with yourself.  Unlike me, you might get out of the house less than 6 hours later than planned.

The moral of every story should be that one: be up-front with yourself.  Because I've read plenty of stories with that moral and I've never read enough stories with that moral.  And my failure to grasp this seemingly simple message has caused me endless amounts of pain and turmoil throughout my life.  Including a recent and necessarily vague incident which has, ultimately, resulted in a couple of relationships being potentially threatened but ultimately strengthened due to positive communication with all involved parties.  The only reason I bring it up, since I know you're probably mildly irritated at my evasiveness, is because (a) I'm in awe of the really deep, beautiful, and important relationships that I have, and the real possibility of working through big issues within those relationships; and (b) there is another moral to the story, namely that working through these issues is well worth it -- both for personal development and for the sake of those relationships.

This is very funny too, because Ann and I had one of the least mushy relationships of my life until sometime this summer when she was rolling her eyes at how I take cans of beans out of the cupboard, knowing she'll be needing them soon, before she's looked for them.  She searches the cupboard for them for several minutes until a frustrated outburst, after which I show her that I've already set everything out on the counter.  Anyway, she was laughing at how ridiculous she thinks it is that I do this, and it suddenly occurred to me that I do this because I love the absolute shit out of her.  Because I never told her that I loved her, or even really hugged her, I expressed my love instead through these small, nonsensical gestures, so she would always know that I was attuned to even her more immaterial needs.  And now we're mushy like soggy bread all the time, and working through our relationship like ballers.

Also, I'm pumped that she has now seen my home turf, met my high school crew.  We had 36 or so jam-packed hours in my town doing things I spent my life doing at another time: going out on the Great Sacandaga Lake with Ahr & Co., making extravagant dinners Katya saw on the Food Channel, hanging by Joe's pool 'til all hours, cruising with Stellato with the top down (the convertible is new), going for a groggy breakfast after a night with the gang, and playing ultimate at the Four Diamonds.  Even on our home turf, though, we need refreshers: during a water break at frisbee Earl suddenly said, "Wow, I don't think I've ever seen that view before.  I've lived here how long...?"  We all turned around to see the sun glittering over the valley spread out before us, lush vegetation and well-manicured houses and remnants of a booming colonial era standing solid and smiling up the hill toward our haunt.  Despite the fact that a lot of places are closing down, and that our population is declining steadily, there is still beauty in the valley.

I'm becoming more and more convinced of an impending apocalypse.  As Mike, Dan, Ann and I pulled out of the driveway to hit the Olympic (fondly and formerly known as the Windmill) Diner for breakfast, Dan noted my completely flat rear driver's side tire.  Joy of joys.  Still sleep-deprived, I was already on the verge of tears, but Mike laughed and said, "No problem.  We'll just go to breakfast and deal with it afterwards.  You'll be on the road in no time."  After breakfast he forced Ann and I to take a nap in the darkened living room while he and Dan spent at least two hours running around town looking for advice and supplies to fix a tire with a nail in it on a Sunday afternoon.  They eventually fixed it up well enough for us to make it down to Delaware, and we headed out.

Mere moments onto the Thruway, I had a panic attack and then got stuck in road work traffic -- so I pulled over and we switched drivers.  Traffic held us up almost all the way to New Jersey, when a huge storm rolled in and worsened over the course of several hours.  At one point Ann opened her window to look out and check on the status of our flat, hit her head on the windowframe the first time out and the second time out was suddenly caught in a deluge of rain dumped from the sky.  "I guess it's fine..." she said, because she had to.  The rain off and on covered the windshield with a layer of water like fun house mirrors or opaque poolhouse glass bricks -- mildly terrifying, and we saw none of the NJ Turnpike scenery.  We prayed to Broseidon and just before the Delaware Memorial Bridge the weather cleared and we made it home without a hitch -- except one lost toll ticket.  Lol.

I'm worried about what I'll do without my wingman, not knowing one single person my age in this unfamiliar and nonsensical city; who I'm supposed to bring to fun events and bars and fundraisers; how I'll meet new people and find places to hang.  But I've decided that I'm going to take my summer vacation -- not that I haven't been having fun all summer, but I'm going to just let myself veg for a few days.  Just long enough to gather steam but not long enough to lose it.  I'm going to work hard to build a constructive and working cohabitation with my family while still maintaining enough independence to keep afloat.  I'm going to work my charms on this city (which I'm already starting not to hate, maybe through accepting that I don't understand it) because apparently I have a gift of meeting a ridiculous number of people ridiculously quickly.  After a jaunt out toward the U. in Newark, I already have met 3 people and thanks to Ann narrowly escaped a parking ticket.  I guess I'll just have to embody both of us.  I already have a bunch of great people and their great life lessons stashed away in my chest cavity...  But there's always room for more.

transience 1

Things are suddenly changing fast.  I haven't checked my email or my snail mail in a week, since I've spent my days running around with friends, seeing things, doing things, really just living.  I've seen a ridiculous number of Oles in the past week, not to mention worlds sliding weirdly together -- meeting Alex Steele in a plaza on Nicolett Mall, introducing him to Ann's high school friend Nick and hordes of Ole classmates, taking him to the St. Croix Tavern...  On Saturday I dragged him to Summer and Owen's wedding, where I was delighted to see and catch up with Allie and Eric and Elaine.

Saturday, actually, was crazy.  I was scheduled to work lunch, but I got switched on the schedule to be out at 4, which was a problem since we were shooting to leave for Northfield at 2:30.  So I had to fanangle a sub, and then still try to get out of the restaurant by 2 in the middle of a late lunch rush -- but not before Mike exploded a keg on me.  I guess I was in the wrong place at the wrong time.  I was muttering to myself all the way up the hill about how I took pains to shower last night so I'd be ready to go immediately after work, and now I'm sticky and covered in beer...  And that's when it started pouring.  So that seven-minute bike ride took care of the sticky, and the sweat, so I could speed-change and eat the burrito Alex and Ann had made for me and hightail it out of there.

Then I got a text message from my brother saying that he and Grampa were leaving the Cities and would be arriving at our house in an hour.  We weren't expecting them until Sunday evening, so we were a little alarmed seeing as we were about to leave, lock up the house, and not return until who knows what time (turned out to be about midnight).  So that was a fiasco, but it worked out just fine in the end.

Basically, I was the luckiest girl in the world this weekend.  I don't know quite how I managed to get 4 of my favorite people in the world into my house at the same time for several days, but there was a moment where I looked in the rearview mirror of my new candy white VW Golf and saw my unbelievably cool grandfather, my first best friend/younger brother, my beloved Bizz, and the ever-important Alex all somehow squished into this tiny space.  The open sunroof must have let in some magic particles/good karma/fresh air/blessings because I have never felt so overwhelmed with uncontested and uncontestable love.  There were so many moments over sweet corn and chili last night where Ann caught my eye with a perma-smile of utter wonder at the family curled around the kitchen island, at the two empty pots of chili.  Plus, all these wonderful people got along so marvelously that I didn't even think to worry about my lucky streak breaking.

But I've got to move on pretty quick now, so I'm turning my immediate attention to the tasks at hand, all moving-related checkboxes to tick over the next 2 days.  Bizz-squared is gung-ho to go, not to leave here but to get on the road.  The time for sadness is both passed and not yet arrived, and we're looking forward.  I'm starting to wonder whether the perfectness of our lives this summer had to do mainly with us living together, and to worry that perfection will get a little dusty when the sun goes away and she is halfway across the country from me.  But thoughts like that are more often than not a self-fulfilling prophecy, so I'm going to try and leave them somewhere along the way, plan trips to Northfield, and look forward to May when maybe I can reclaim all the kitchen utensils I paid for at St. Croix Falls garage sales -- i.e., mix them all back up so we don't have to separate whose is whose.

Today is my last day of work, and it's another knot I'm tying in my life here.  Yesterday I exchanged email addresses with Erik the cook/drummer, who wants to play a show in Wilmington/Philly sometime this year.  Saturday was our last SCF Farmers' Market, where we bid farewell to all our favorite sellers and they handed us free yellow tomatoes and business cards on top of our guilty last orders.  Our fridge is overflowing with summer squash and zucchini and sweet orange cherry tomatoes, celery and kale and a jar of fresh maple syrup.  Ann is taking our bikes and the Rover down to Hudson early tomorrow morning, ending the brief love affair between our two adorable vehicles, my brief argument with the gear switch on my borrowed bicycle, and our low-impact thigh-happy summer.

This is both an isolated event in my life and the catalyst for my first inklings that transience is something cosmically significant about me and my worldly existence.  Take my thoughts first and foremost as a current play-by-play, but note the foreshadowing because I suspect you will be seeing much more of Me, the Straddler of Worlds, in the weeks and months to come.

Until then,
The Present Clara

summergirls

New Kids on the Block had a bunch of hits

Chinese food makes me sick

But I think it's fly when girls stop by for the summer

For the summer

I like girls that wear Abercrombie & Fitch

I'd take her if I had one wish

But she's been gone since that summer

Since that summer

(LFO)

This is me.  Yep.  Been gone since that summer.  I show up for awhile and then, just when you think...

But I love summer.  Last night we got a call inviting us to a bonfire on Deer Lake with a bunch of actors from Festival Theatre.

Nothing says summer better than passing beers around a fire, skinnydipping in a 75-degree lake, eating leftover potato chips on a beach house roof and watching the stars.  You can see the whole Milky Way out here.  I can't think of one single thing that is more summer than last night.  It reminded me of Chris Lund.  It reminded me of Amsterdam and Joe Lavicka's house and Dan's backyard and unfiltered cigarettes.

Summer is sharing cigarettes and leaving beers in your friends' refrigerators -- or mainly, our friends leaving beers in our fridge.  Or mainly, Russell leaving beers in our fridge and wedging butts between the cracks of our front steps.

There is a part of a day that reeks of summer, the cool damp that sets in with dusk and lingers after dawn, when you wake up smelling the lush outside and shivering a little in your long T-shirt -- knowing that by noon it will have melted off and you'll be squinting into some mirage ahead.  The cool damp that descends immediately upon clean laundry left too long on the clothesline.

Summer is talking about the weather.  Making bets with your coworkers about exactly what time the storm will set in, and whether it will affect business.  Speculating about whether vast numbers of cell phone towers springing up across the country is the cause of rampant tornadoes these days.  Wishing city-dwelling strangers clear skies for their vacations in North Country and drying your jeans over the air conditioner once you've ridden your bike to work after a rainstorm.

Riding your bike to the grocery store, stocking up on sale sharp cheddar, waiting for Marketplace to restock plain Greek yogurt, and cramming outrageous loads into a backpack to pedal back home screaming Will Smith songs at the top of your lungs and STILL being silenced by the forest and the wind and the asphalt.

And note the "SPEED LIMIT <35 mph" sign when you're on the final stretch.  <3 summer

REALLY in the moment (incl. flashback to my original past)

I think I've decided.  I think I'm going to stay in Delaware after September 5.

I think what I'm going to hate leaving most is bantering with Tony in the kitchen.  At least that's how it feels these days.  And as far as I'm concerned, that's what's true.

I was just remembering today, as a result of lamenting over the anticipated loss of this daily banter, I used to have an imaginary friend named Tone.  You can laugh, in fact you may nearly die of laughter, but my best imaginary friend for a lot of my early childhood was a guy named Fingerbopper, mature and well-rounded, and we told each other everything.  His girlfriend's name (get this) was Poony -- contrary to popular belief, her name comes from the word spoon in a secret language I had with myself and apparently my imaginary friends.  She was insanely jealous of my very close relationship with Fingerbopper for quite some time after her introduction to my social network, but eventually we worked out our differences and the three of us got along smashingly.  You might think that her having a male best friend would have assuaged her jealousy, but it really didn't have that much effect.  Tone was her best friend, and he was quite a legendary basketball player who occasionally stooped to playing street ball with my brother's team of imaginary friends.  You might also think that Tone and I would hit it off so we could double-date with Fingerbopper and Poony, but our relationship was little more than cordial, friendly at best.  He was definitely a cool guy, and pretty attractive as imaginary boys go, but we were well aware that our lives were going in drastically different directions, and we were more than OK with that fact.

You might be laughing hysterically, but consider for a moment how complex each of these characters are, and to what extent each of them exists separate from their relationship with me.  It's pretty extraordinary.

I Need Social.

Right now this means, I have been halfheartedly trying to work internet time into my schedule for nearly a week now; the reason I'm even giving this a second thought is because I desperately want to keep up on my blog.  (And to read Liz's -- yes, believe it or not I do keep relatively up to date, Lizzy...)  I don't return phone calls, unless they are important logistically.  I have friends over every day.  I am seeing the sights -- on Wednesday Eric and I drove over to Osceola to visit Cascade Falls, which reminded me of so many beautiful moments in my life.  I love waterfalls.  As I gushed over this eternal adoration, Eric commented on how easy it is to become numb to the beauties and attractions around your backyard when you're a local.  I returned, maybe without thinking very hard about it, that I don't think that's necessarily true...  But he caught my eye and said, "What I'm basically saying is, I've been really enjoying being refreshed, it's like seeing them for the first time, with you."

Basically what I want to do tonight, as soon as I leave here (when the library closes in 4 minutes) is: call Eric and invite him over to watch Benny and Joon, which he's been trying to make me do for almost a week now; eat a late dinner with Ann and Russell when they get back from fishing; and then go to the Tavern in hopes of running into my coworkers there.

It's so simple, but so rewarding.  This is what I'm living for right now.

good people

I'm writing from the shelter of the library, the best place on Main Street to find respite from heat, thirst, thunder and/or lightning.  It's been a beautiful past couple of days, but we're apparently supposed to have rain all this week and I got out of work 2 hours later than anticipated only to be threatened by lightning slicing the sky and gathering thunder.

Yesterday Ann and I succeeded in creating the most epic lounge-around Sunday of all time, complete with house cocktails, naked time, dance breaks, hammock time, grooming, Chinese take-out, and chick flicks.  This week I have to work a lot because half of the other servers are on vacation, and I've ended up with several extra hours per day even from my original beefed-up schedule.  So I'm a little anxious about that, but I also love my work and it's good to bulk up my bank accounts before things get torn up again.  I might finally be able to renew my American passport, after a year of having only up-to-date Ecuadorian ID...

But yes, I do love my job, and it shows.  Almost every day someone tells me good luck in my future endeavors.  On Saturday someone burst out during a wine tasting, "See, now, you're the kind of person that gives me hope for the future!"  I also got over-the-top verbal thanks for "taking such good care of us," and note on a credit card receipt with a star by my name and a note that said, "nice service!"  It's really nice to know I'm doing a good job, and while the industry measures success in tip percentage of sales, I appreciate the direct positive feedback.  Customer service seems to be a good place for me.  Note taken.

On the home front, we're having a lot of visitors in the next couple of weeks: Sarah (who roomed with both Ann and I over the past two years) and Stephen are showing up tonight after Indian dinner out with Eric; this weekend, my steady college friend Lisa will most likely spend some time with us; next week my old friend Alex will take a Greyhound out from Amsterdam, and Grampa and Thomas will stay for a few nights when they drop off my car!  Playing almost constant hostess seems daunting from now, but it will be fun to have all those people see my life here.  Apologies in advance for having a life, i.e. I will have to work a lot.  But I'll take good care of you all.

I got an offer to rent a room from one of my coworkers if I end up sticking around here come September, which takes one issue off the table.  I'd still need another job, although that's the case either way.  While my most touted woe about the prospect of leaving Wisconsin is the prospect of leaving all Wisconsin's wonderful microbreweries, my most pressing woe is the prospect of leaving my Bizz, my mainstay: Ann (despite the fact that anyone who has seen us together on our home turf might think we really can't stand each other, just because of our banter).  I also feel this pang in my chest whenever the guy at the Chinese restaurant says, "Oh, welcome to the area!" or when Tony stops at the kitchen window at the restaurant to say, "I just decided I want to get to know you better, because you're so quiet and I don't know anything about you -- you should come out with us sometimes."  Or when Mike and Linda sit at the bar while I wash glasses and tease, "So when are you coming back from Delaware?  You're messing up our schedule!"  And I realize how many wines I still haven't tasted.

At the same time, the idea of hanging out with my sisters or visiting my brother at school in Boston on a regular basis is a really nice one; I'd love to be able to swing up toward friends back in Amsterdam or at different New York schools without breaking the bank; and of course I couldn't complain about not having to pay rent!  I also realized recently that I haven't really talked to my parents in weeks, maybe even a full month, which is weird.  There are still things I'd love to learn from them, in fact things I would never have thought to ask about before I'd been living mostly on my own for awhile, and I really do think they're cool.  I go back and forth every couple of days between staying out east or staying midwest, feeling like I've set my heart on one thing or the other, and then something changes, I have one conversation or thought and it's totally switched or at least back to the drawing board.  This is agonizing.

And yet I've never been happier with my life.