DC’s three seasons

Spring-mmer, Autumnal Heaven, and Winter(less)

 

DC’s Spring-mmer is in the air. Spring vitality + summer swelter descend simultaneously here in the nation’s capital, known to skip the balmy breezes of spring and catapult into the muggy, built-on-top-of-a swamp heat, thick and pasty like oatmeal. That’s right, you can bend down and gather up that gloppy, dense heat in your hands, form it between your sweaty palms, and fling it at the segway-rider who stands next to you at the red light, holding an icy pack to his melting forehead.

 

 

Having grown up in Dallas, I know the miracle of coming inside to an refrigerator-cool house after being outside in temperatures that are warned by news anchors and local officials as being dangerous to one’s health. I love the aura of summer, but I hate it’s migraine-inducing heat.  And living in a city that truly WAS built on a swamp, who boasts no skyscrapers with temporarily cooling relief from their spacious shadows, I suffer. Central air is scarce, public pools are urine-ridden, and hotel amenity pools have caught on to the “Can I just take a dip while I wait for my parents to park the car?” scam. I guess I’m finally starting to show my age.

 

I don’t care if I have to apply suntan lotion every hour, and never leave the house without my watergun-fan and parasol. I will NOT let the sun’s lava hot breath keep me from enjoying the magic of summer this year. Quarries, lakes, beaches, rivers, canals, and the Georgetown public pool (the only one in DC without tadpoles) get ready: here I come, flippered and unevenly- coated in Banana Boat, ready to canon ball in your tepid, murky waters!

 

 

My son

Rrrrrrr

Highlights of the weekend (in the key of R):

 

Redefining my stereotype for all comic book movies being the same (terrible).

Resuscitating my high school crush on Robert Downey Jr.

Realizing that although my now 10 week old kitten has a brand new, heavily padded fleece bed to sleep on, he prefers the edge of my wooden craft desk (yes, the edge, because he likes when his quarter-sized paws dangle over the edge).

Rekindling conversations from the Youngblood fest in Lemoyne, PA on Saturday at the last Set to Explode show on Sunday in DC.

Road-tripping: See above, DC to Lemoyne, PA and back. Kind of quaint and redneck all at once. They had some pretty bridges, though.

Recipe-making: this means margaritas from SCRATCH. Tequila, triple sec, and ice. Oh yeah, and lime juice.

Rejoice: I finally have a kitten!

The cannibalistic tendencies of DC bus drivers

Stopped at the Yes natural foods store for some fresh basil yesterday afternoon (my neighborhood Giant has chicken feet with claws intact and neon plastic folding chairs, but no fresh basil), and decided to catch the bus home from Adam’s Morgan. I waited at the hooded bench while the bus pulled up and whipped out my Smartrip card (I get really anxious and flustered if I don’t have specific counted change or a fully funded Smartrip card in hand BEFORE boarding).

 

As I stepped up, I saw her profile and tried to conceal my surprise.

 

There she sat, indie-girl extraordinaire, complete with her cherry-red hair, cut into a neat wedge (longer in front, shorter in back). She wore sequin-y black hoop earrings, and I could have sworn she was wearing black nail polish.

 

Was I surprised that she was young? Yes.

Was I surprised that she was white? Yes.

Was I surprised that she was female? Yes.

Was I surprised that she was pretty? Yes.

Was I surprised that she had a pretty hip sense of style? Yes.

Was I surprised that she greeted me with eye contact, a smile, and a hello? Yes times five.

 

I was so excited to see her, because she defies the norm. I try not to take cabs in DC, since they’re a bigger rip off than Sea Monkeys, but every time I do, I always hope that I will plop down in the backseat, only to find myself escorted by a woman-any woman! Of course, this has yet to happen after three years of living in the city.

 

I accidentally sat down in a seat that was meant for the handicapped only, still in the swirl of my surprise. I think I just wanted to have a good view of the young indie driver while her bus carted me along for the next 10 blocks.

 

So I guiltlessly observed her as we glided along down Columbia Rd. Watched her content lips stay in place, never to turn down, only to turn up a few degrees when she opened the door for a new passenger to hurry in. And that made my heart go out to her. Especially because of her slow, natural smile. Nothing she picked up from the DC bus driver’s job manual; nothing more than a pleasant disposition. And I swear I heard her hum.  

 

And then, after remembering the DC bus drivers who would pull up to the curb, a mere inches from where I stood after having waited for 30 minutes, only to peel out and leave me standing there for another more, I realized. I thought of the two bus drivers I once saw side by side at a red light on Massachusetts Ave, screaming obscenities at each other through their panel windows. I thought of the suited man who boarded my bus one morning and told the bus driver to f*ck off, and that he was “coming back for him” as made his stormy exit.

 

Finally, I let the inevitable and unfortunate thought be born: This poor girl’s sweetness will be snatched away like candy from an open palm.

 

Good luck, Miss Indie.

Lola’s magical sex change

After a full week of visiting every animal shelter in DC, I have finally found my feline soul mate. She was actually the first kitten I met, and greeted me with a sweet purr. When I reached in toward the back of her cage where her 2 siblings crouched, she heaved her 1.5 lb fuzzy body on my wrist and batted the top of my hand repeatedly, like a mother slapping her young boy’s hand as he reaches for his seventh cookie. She was protecting her little brother and sister, and as she slapped my hand incessantly, (I swear she broke out in a sweat), I got weaker and weaker and fell on the floor laughing. I should have just scooped her up into my purse and scrammed.

 

Fate was screaming in my ear, “She’s the one!” while I visited the rest of DC’s homeless felines. Either they got adopted out before my application was accepted, or something just didn’t feel right. Either way, I was feeling guilty about getting a kitten, thinking I should give a home to an adult cat who was in greater need of love, but the only call back I got was from my attacker kitten. I went back to The Washington Humane Society where she is temporarily living and decided that there was/is no other kitten in this world more perfect for me than her.

 

So the shelter manager told me I’d have to wait a week and a half to take her home, after she was spayed. I wasn’t happy about it, but I really had no choice. I decided to name her Lola, and went to visit her yet again this weekend. We were playing in the visiting room; she was springboarding herself against walls and spiderwalking horizontally against the futon in the room, when I noticed the letters “B” and “O” in big capital letters on her collar. I picked up the peanut-sized kitten in my hands and finished the word.

 

B-O-Y.

 

Lola?! I immediately flipped her over on her back for a little inspection. Looks like my little darling is actually a handsome little feller after all. The adoptions manager confirmed this (a bit sheepishly), and I was left reeling in the hilarity that I almost named my first born kitten-child Lola, a name AND FATE which she shares with that same Lola that the Kinks wrote a song about. Yes, she was a transvestite. In case you have forgotten the words, or never heard them-shame on you! (paraphrased lyrics):

 

 

 

I met her in a club down in old soho

Where you drink champagne and it tastes just like cherry-cola

C-o-l-a cola

She walked up to me and she asked me to dance

I asked her her name and in a dark brown voice she said lola

L-o-l-a lola lo-lo-lo-lo lola

 

Well Im not the worlds most physical guy

But when she squeezed me tight she nearly broke my spine

Oh my lola lo-lo-lo-lo lola

Well Im not dumb but I cant understand

Why she walked like a woman and talked like a man

Oh my lola lo-lo-lo-lo lola lo-lo-lo-lo lola

 

Well we drank champagne and danced all night

Under electric candlelight

She picked me up and sat me on her knee

And said dear boy wont you come home with me

Well Im not the worlds most passionate guy

But when I looked in her eyes well I almost fell for my lola

Lo-lo-lo-lo lola lo-lo-lo-lo lola

Lola lo-lo-lo-lo lola lo-lo-lo-lo lola

 

I pushed her away

I walked to the door

I fell to the floor

I got down on my knees

Then I looked at her and she at me

 

Well thats the way that I want it to stay

And I always want it to be that way for my lola

Lo-lo-lo-lo lola

Girls will be boys and boys will be girls

Its a mixed up muddled up shook up world except for lola

Lo-lo-lo-lo lola

 

Well I left home just a week before

And Id never ever kissed a woman before

But lola smiled and took me by the hand

And said dear boy Im gonna make you a man

 

Well Im not the worlds most masculine man

But I know what I am and Im glad Im a man

And so is lola

Lo-lo-lo-lo lola lo-lo-lo-lo lola

Lola lo-lo-lo-lo lola lo-lo-lo-lo lola

I’m gonna be a momma

I’m going to adopt a kitten!

 

After the past 8 years of living independently of my parents, and thus of any animal permanence, I am finally a mother.

 

Why have I waited so long to adopt a cat, even though I’m (just) a younger version of the feline-obsessed crazy cat ladies? Because I’m (cat)-crazy, that’s why. Way too paranoid and overprotective to raise a kitten in a world of college-aged roommates who leave Budweiser cans on the bathroom sink, and who leave the front door open for 20 minutes as they load their band gear into the back of their Volvos.

 

I’m too old to be “open-minded” enough to live with people who don’t love animals. Those people have always made me uncomfortable and suspicious, anyway. What the hell is not to love?!!

 

I was also pretty financially unstable for awhile. I did make enough to go to Europe on a $20 per day income, but that reduced me to debt for a year. I know kitten chow isn’t exactly paycheck-breaking, and that I could have easily concocted my kitty’s bed from an old couch pillow (rather than a fancy Petsmart bed like this:

And I could’ve saved money on those catnip mice or laser pointers by rolling up some tin foil balls or candy wrappers (kittens truly adore these, just the way a human kid will open the blinky-talking expensive wonder-toy on Christmas morning and spend more time playing with the box it came in that the toy itself). But still..I just wasn’t ready for the onset of paranoia that motherhood would undoubtedly cause.

 

All I want is the best for my little furball. I want him to grow up in a climate-controlled world of material pleasures,  and gluttonous fantasies. A kitty utopia where streams of warm milk flow next to catnip fields and there are endless warm laps to rest on, and countless pairs of hands for ear scratching. That’s the life for my Lola.

 

What I Learned from Ira Glass

When the houselights went down on Saturday night, George Washington University’s packed Lisner Auditorium was flooded in darkness. Darker than space mountain at Disney World, perhaps even as dark as planetary outer space, and almost as eerily silent. Until he spoke:

 

“Well, it IS radio, after all.”

 

Just six nameless, faceless words, and the invisible audience of at least 5,000 cheered fanatically like kids at their first circus. His ordinary-but-adored voice (“you just THINK I’m the voice of a radio announcer”) swirled and resonated so that it seemed he was all around us. (I’m sure some deity comparisons were made that night, most likely by cat-eye bespectacled females in the audience). When the lights went up, there was no question about it. There he was, in the flesh, sitting alone at his tradeshow-booth desk in front of a solitary microphone.

 

Ira Glass is the bookish yet comely host of NPR’s beloved radio show, This American Life. Now in its 13th year on air, This American Life has amassed quite an expansive and motley audience, by being an anti-radio-show kind of a radio show. No breaking news delivered in alternatively emphasized syllables (think: most voices in film-noir), no rubber ball interviews (question, answer, question, answer). This American Life puts modern TV and talk radio to shame, by providing a reality factor AND a truly compelling story.

 

 Each episode is dedicated to a topic, and each topic has a subset of three or four stories dedicated to that topic. One example is an NPR staff and fan-favorite entitled Babysitting. Sounds pretty mundane, right? But listen on, and you’ll hear the first story, a childhood story of Doug, the eldest of four siblings who takes his parents weekend absence as the opportunity to turn the household into a real life horror movie. He hides in the corn fields behind their house, stuffs straw down his shirt and howls incessantly, convincing his trembling siblings that he is, in fact, a teenage werewolf. The story is hilarious, until the point when he shuts off the power breaker, and the house turns pitch black. He corners his youngest sibling alone in a room illuminated only by a sliver of moonlight. The small boy is so utterly terrified that all he can say to his disguised older brother is “I don’t care, kill me if you want. Be done with this; however you want to end it. I’m done.”

 

And that’s the beauty of This American Life. It’s the good, the bad, and the ugly of America. Stories such as this one from everyday people that are an amalgamation of frightening, serious, hilarious, and heartfelt, but most importantly, REAL. This show is the heartbeat of NPR, an already renowned and revered radio program, but This American Life gives a voice back, from the audience TO the audience. There are also featured short stories and readings from such noted writers as David Sedaris, Nick Hornby, Russell Banks, Dave Eggers, Michael Chabon, Tobias Wolff, and more. However, when This American Life is on-air, Glass is mostly a listener.

 

As a pilot of the story, he introduces, he asks some rhetorical questions, he reflects and summarizes, but mostly he sits back and lets each guest tell their own story, in their own words. This is why it was so refreshing to witness his interplay with a live audience at Lisner Auditorium this past weekend. It was Ira all by himself, and yet he held us captivated for an entire two hours. He played a tape narrated by his two friends, a married couple who vividly remember seeing Jackie Onassis Kennedy waving to them in NYC’s Central Park years ago. They recall the beautiful colors of her suit jacket and matching hat; they remember waving back to her and the sheepish embarrassment they felt when they realized she was not waving to them, but to the cab situated directly behind them. And the best part of the story? The husband, the one who described in perfect detail the crispness of the leaves that autumn day, and the color of Jackie O’s outfit? Turns out he wasn’t even at the park that day! The tape continues to roll and the married couple argues- she says he wasn’t there, while he swears he was. This anecdote underlined Glass’ theory about the favorite stories we tell so often that we actually become a part of them. It’s just the kind of story you hear on This American Life.

 

As a creator of the show, Glass is a literary/journalistic hero. During his performance, he shared with all-too-eager ears, his recipe for a successful story: action, action, action, reflection. This is the formula he uses when concocting the stories on This American Life, and it’s a winning potion, because when you sit back and listen to the program, you feel as if you’re sitting around the dinner table listening to family stories at Thanksgiving. You get the same goose-bumps that you did telling ghost stories in front of the campfire as a kid. According to Glass, Americans are inherently trained to love the kinds of stories that TAL offers. We want the action, and we anticipate the reflection at the end, perhaps because we are taught that every action has a reaction? And although Glass works in a journalistic field, he protested that modern journalism is a monotonous regurgitation of fact, with little to no room for surprise or candidness. But This American Life has been going strong for 13 years, is now a TV show on Showtime, and is rumored to be a forthcoming movie. It’s successful and beloved because it IS surprising and candid. It throws reporting structure and formalities out the window by allowing scenes and character development. It’s set to some seriously hip college radio station-worthy music. Its host is ardently respected, even though he says “um” and “like” a heck of a lot. It’s progress and hopeful change for the future of radio. And Ira isn’t bad-looking either.

 

Boy burns all his money to live in a derelict school bus

 As an English major in college, I read Shakespeare’s tragedies and comedies. I glossed over Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and filled up my page margins with translations from olde English to modern English (Wyfe of Bath= Wife of Bath). I paddled through Langston Hughes’ The Big Sea and I blazed through (well, not entirely) Dante’s Inferno. But of all the beloved authors, poets and novelists I consumed, those who spanned different centuries, backgrounds, ethnicities, and ages, there was one story I read that eclipsed all others, with a one-on-one author/reader bond based on human empathy and a yearning for a more fulfilling life- an alternative path to working in a windowless cubicle, married and mothering by age 30, never really knowing the limit of one’s capabilities to adventure, create, compose, explore and provoke, because T-ball 4 Tots took away that precious time for exploration of self and surroundings.

Into the Wild is author Jon Krakauer’s account of the Chris McCandless pathos: the story of an ordinary yet extraordinary recent college grad who dreams of a different life for himself. His affluent family and wealth-padded childhood renders its opposite intention and leads him to crave a comfort not found in the cotton/linen amalgamation that constitutes an American dollar bill. His comfort is a meaningful life, and to him, that means a life free of financial and material burdens, and full of personal exploration and adventure. New travels minus selfish and unnecessary possessions equals new experiences and personal awakening. The final answer? True happiness and fulfillment of the soul.

Thinking back to that modern lit class, I’m grateful that my professor selected this book, because of its temporal context in my life at that time. I was standing on the brink of graduation, wondering where my poetry workshops would land me in the land-mine of corporate careers. (Coincidentally, the professor had us read Kate Chopin’s The Awakening right afterward. Interesting…) It resonated with me because after all the worldly confessions and narratives I studied that semester, here was a young man who was my age, had come from a similar background, heck he even grew up in Annandale- only 15 minutes away from the very campus at which I devoured this book! He got me to thinking. (About life, about questions and answers, about education). My parents paid $100,000 for my formal education, and how will I ever measure or employ its quantitative worth? Is it imperative that I upon graduating from GMU I move, with diploma in hand, from 4 classroom walls to 4 corkboard cubicle walls, and plunk my soon-to-be-deskass down at a computer monitor for 8 hours a day, just to prove on my resume that I understand the process of equations? (Bachelor of Arts degree in English with a concentration in non-fiction writing and editing equals technical writing job for anonymous fill-in-the-blank DC nonprofit).

Did I even gain any precise skills? Not precisely. (This is why I respect car mechanics, ice-skaters, pediatricians, hairdressers, and construction workers/housebuilders, among many, many more). I can pretty much sum up what I got from 4 years of college in one word. Are you ready?

Horizon.

Is that worth anything? Or does it sound like a cheap excuse because it can’t be measured in test scores and applied answers and empirical evidence? There are McCandless critics out there who are too quick to point out his naivete. His stupidity even, for convincing himself that he could live alone in the Alaskan back country, with nothing but a 10lb sack of rice, some water and a botanist’s guide to edible plants (no map, no compass). And what that tells me is that maybe he DID know he couldn’t live there indefinitely, but the idea of 6 months in his own version of utopia was better than a lifetime or 50 more years in what he considered to be imprisonment. To be imprisoned is to be confined and controlled, and that he was not.

And isn’t horizon what Chris got? Horizon is something that broadens your thinking, that challenges the way you once thought and opens your mind to more. It should be transformative. And that’s what happened to Chris. His new horizon or perspective was that that stuff didn’t even matter anymore! So now who is smart and who is not?        

I’m cryogenically UNfrozen!

I read an article yesterday that said blogs are the new resumes. If that’s the case, I’m still in Mr. Watto’s 10th grade Western Civ class, and working as a produce cashier at Shady Brook Farm on the weekends. 

Don’t ask me why I am only now, in the year 2008, finally getting around to buying my own personal computer (“own” and “personal” are redundant, I know, but this sad anecdote needs emphasis).  Also, don’t ask me how I’ve survived without a computer for the past 8 to 10 years, (and yes, a few of you have actually uttered that very word, “survived”), because I can’t tell you that either. Also, because you don’t need a computer to survive, silly. Just matches and oxygen and water and Odwalla bars. 

Believe it or not, I DID have a personal laptop at one point in my life. Just after high school graduation, Dad gave me an extra one of his 15 lb. CTX brand laptops (come again?) from his work that no one used anymore–go figure.  So I lugged the lap-sized (lap of a sideshow circus lady, that is) laptop down to Fairfax with me, and had the campus IT guy hook it up (the look on my face when he asked me for my IP address must have been priceless. I think I may have said, “No, PA–you know, Pennsylvania”). Either way, it lasted all of a week. Couldn’t get any internet connection, and even the university IT dept couldn’t help restore any life. So my roommate shared hers, in exchange for me downloading some of the best songs from Napster to ever grace her desktop (this included the Cure’s “Pictures of You”, Sunny Day Real Estate’s “Bucket of Chicken” and The Queens of the Stoneage’s “The Lost Art of Keeping a Secret”). 

I bet her crappy old Dell misses me now. 

So on to the point-why am I finally joining the ranks of laptop-toting humanity? Well, as I’ve been an oblivious victim (or survivor) of trends bypassing me all my life, this is one I think will work in my favor, no matter what season my skin tone, or shape of my butt. I’d like to temporarily set the mighty pen aside and see if I can train my brain to start thinking in new ways. (If you too have long or always been a notepad-carrying devotee, then you exactly how hard this really is. Rewiring is necessary). I can only hope this new feeling will sweep me off my feet, of an ADD mind suddenly released from the timely shackles of pen and notepaper. No more eraser fury actually tearing holes through the paper (although in reality, I write strictly with blue Papermate pens–don’t know how or why). I hope this will work; I’m sure it will increase my workflow and actual output, so procrastination is no longer on the menu. Only time will tell, so stay tuned….

TGIF

Finally moved in. Finally Friday.