10

one of the many reasons i will never be mistaken for "cool" is the excitement, really exhilaration i feel upon first casing the shelves of a new-to-me public library. when we were little, my mom would let us "drive" by putting us on her lap and giving us what we thought was control over the steering wheel. if all the mormon mothering blogs i have in my google reader were to hear about that, they'd probably tsk tsk and pull their own children back a bit so as to avoid accidental contamination, but luckily they don't seem to have the same weird obsession with me as i do them. and anyways, tough, because it was pretty much the best evs.
so one day it was my sister's turn. she must have been three or four at the time, since her hair was still solidly mulleted. as she's "driving" up the street to our house at about a snail's pace she proclaimed, "look at all the cars i missed!"

and that's how i felt at the public library today--look at all the books i haven't read yet! my current mystery writer of choice is amanda cross, partly because she's really carolyn heilbrun, a fancy pants virginia woolf scholar who very nicely answered an email i sent at seventeen; mostly because knowing that makes me feel like the books don't really count as trashy mysteries; and definitely because the protagonist is an english professor who pokes around in other peoples' lives and solves mysteries (my dream career in many respects). and the lexington public library did not disappoint: there was a whole shelf of yet-to-be-read amanda crosses. i snatched them up, every last one i hadn't read, and as i walked down the stairs to checkout trying to will the stack not to teeter, i felt like a greedy child who knows that she has taken too many cookies and that others will not have enough. and like the child, i can't seem to stop, or care.

public libraries are really a miraculous thing. there's usually a cross-section of society there: older men in threadbare shirts working diligently on something--though who knows what?--at a table; moms who radiate exhaustion corralling a group of toddlers around the kiddie section; awkward teenage boys who refuse to learn volume control and angrily debate the merits of lord knows what but there's always something in the corner. i like how the people you see inside aren't much different than who you see outside. but because they're in a library i feel more charitable to them--because how bad can people who voluntarily surround themselves with books be? a friend of a friend in college once proclaimed that "fiction is a waste of time" and this became the number one charge on the indictment against him that i composed in my head.

currently i'm going through what might be politely called a not-so-deep spell in terms of my reading tastes. maybe i should be worried that i can't remember the last time i read something that made me work too hard to unravel the meaning of a line. noun verb object is how i seem to like my printed sentences these days. and not only am i not reading the hard ones, i also seem to be missing the point of the others. at least that's what i'm left to consider after reading reviews of this a.m. holmes book that i just listened to in the car. apparently it's a satire, but i had no idea--sometimes it would sucker punch me so much that i'd sit in the car in the darkness outside my apartment complex finishing a chapter and gasping for air. audiobooks are really an amazing thing, especially for people who tend to skim and not absorb. every. word. which makes it even weirder and worrisome that i missed completely that it's satirical. and sure, looking back, a story that involves a huge sinkhole in los angeles should be suspect. but i took it totally literally, and when the main character spent three minutes looking at the sinkhole, i dutifully pictured one and then also gazed into it.

so is that a book recommendation? i don't even know; the audio CD was definitely a lovely way to spend 10 hours but what maybe the written version is more self-aware and jokey. all i know is that i miss richard novak, the awkward semi-recluse protagonist. he accompanied me all around town for the past three weeks. when richard grocery shopped, i'd find myself following suit, and i don't think it's any coincidence that the day after listening to him notice another character's cluttered house had me tidying up stacks into piles.

and really, that feeling you get when some piece of fiction bleeds over into you the reader/viewer's life is surreal in the best pedro almodovar-sort of way. like the way that you come out of the theater after a particularly affecting movie and look at everything curiously, as if the cars in the parking lot are no longer just cars but signs of a sea change. people talk about the escapist value of books, but there's also that burrowing ability of some that lasts longer than "the end," where it doesn't just feel like a one-sided reader/static text relationship but more of a call and response. and if that's a waste of time, then i am a spendthrift, albeit one currently trolling the aisles of the dollar tree. although amanda cross strikes me as at least a meijer.

9

i was already thinking about being old before michael jackson died. i mean, i had to cut short my conversations about him maybe being dead to go to water aerobics. but his death got me thinking, through the warm-ups where i tried not to splash the woman in the pool connected to an oxygen tank (no, really), through the lightning storm that cut the class short even though it was in an indoor pool, through the slightly wet drive home where i flipped through stations looking for a great, hell, any MJ song. "smooth criminal" came on while i was pulling into the apartment complex, and i sat in my car until after it finished, letting the DJ take a call from a woman who said that she had taught her kids the dances. "they can't read but they can moonwalk." okay fine, she didn't say it in so many words, but in my head everyone's a little more pithy when contributing to my point.

it's funny to think that, when i have kids (don't hold your breath, mom. no time soon), that michael jackson will be much as elvis was for me--a guy who made killer music and yeah, was a little weird and got tragic there near the end, but all that's forgiven when you put on the great stuff and dance around the house. i'd put john lennon in there too, since when i was little i sniffed at his free love later days, but it's probably time to put the snobbishness of my nine-year-old self to bed.

because that's what all of this reminds me of: being nine. that was the year my favorite book was ryan white: my own story. i had a paperback copy and read and reread sections so much that the spine broke and pages started falling out, even though i knew it didn't end well--that every time he would die. i remember hating kokomo, indiana, because that's where he was from and the kids at school were mean to him and wouldn't be in the pool if he was in it, and the idea of everyone else refusing to inhabit the same space was more than i could bear to read about (and yet i did, again). factor VIII was the name of the blood product, and i would shiver when i thought about it--even the name sounded sinister.

i also remember being mad, too, that so much time and attention was paid to ryan white (both names always said, like an incantation), because most people didn't get AIDS through blood transfusions and it seemed unfair that he get so much attention when others got so little. but that wasn't really ryan white's fault. he was just a scrawny kid who couldn't stop bleeding. and somehow he met all these famous people--macaulay culkin and elton john, but his favorite was michael jackson, who invited him to neverland. there was a photo section, and one of the photos was him holding bubbles, and i was jealous, even though i didn't want to die and i didn't even really want to meet michael jackson. because i wanted to hold a chimpanzee and pretend that it was a baby. i wanted to hold that chimpanzee wearing a diaper and rock it to sleep.

that christmas, when i was nine, my dad gave me an instructional video on how to do the moonwalk--one of those presents that he "saw and thought of me." i never opened it, and in college i went digging through the old tapes to find it and display it ironically but it was lost by then. but why would i have watched it? michael jackson wasn't a real person to me, and though my friends and i liked to "moonwalk," we mostly liked to slide our feet backwards across the rug in the living room.

it's actually my dad that made me start thinking about getting old. not that he is. really. but he had surgery this morning to fix his shoulder. and when i asked him what happened, why he needed mending, he said that it's the shoulder he's been sleeping on for the last thirty years or so. there was no sudden injury or accident: doing something that's pretty much as passive as it gets over and over broke things down. and this has stuck with me--the idea that as we get older, it's not searches for adventure that spell our doom or need for convalescence. no, it's the day to day that wears us out, takes its toll.

and while shoulders can be mended (and my parents aren't allowed to get sick, anyhow, i've continued to decree), a lot of these injuries are less-seen but more permanent. like the hard-faced women at meijer who refuse to smile, even when i chatter after them and try my hardest to be sunny: did they just stop smiling one day? how did they get there? or the slightly-weird older man in the water aerobics class. does he know he's weird? he couldn't have planned to be like that, could he? weird guy in water aerobics class surely can't be anyone's goal.

when i was nine, twenty-five seemed so old. it's the average age women get married in this country, and even though i suspected i'd be older than that (the things i caught onto even in fourth grade), i figured on being settled at least by this age. and while lots of things are frustratingly in flux, i realize more and more that, even if it's not the way i imagined, i am settled. i no longer walk into stores awestruck at all the adults shuffling around me. i know what type of pillow i like to sleep on and have a little trouble adjusting when i travel. certain things have to get done, and so they do. and none of this really feels bad, but it was simply inconceivable to my nine-year-old self, who once cried when she started thinking about having to pay taxes when she got older, since "it just seems so not fun." and yeah, the prospect of kids and the like still feels foreign, but the day-to-day stuff is more than conceivable--it's often already existent.

so then i have to wonder: is the way i sleep now and tomorrow night and the nights after going to mean that i too have to have surgery in thirty-odd years? should i be reconsidering the pillow selection (even though i would hate to change)? when i think about holding a chimpanzee like a baby now, a piece of me still wants to, but that's quickly silenced by the other me who has seen the 20/20 videos on what happens to people who anthropomorphize primates; it certainly ain't pretty.
nothing can stay as it is, as it was--if mj taught us anything, it could be that--and yet. and yet.

8

i was all set to write about lightning bugs here. others may insist on "fireflies" but my family's always called them lightning bugs. we only saw them when we came here to visit my grandmother. we'd find jars and run around shrieking and trying to capture some. and then, once we managed to trap an unfortunate one, we'd shake the jar, when our mom wasn't looking, to make it light up again. we always tried to remember to let them out before they asphyxiated, but though i don't remember any deaths, i'm sure there was some mortality. we were young and stupid, after all.

i was all set to come and write about how lightning bug season has arrived in full force in kentucky--how, when i first got here, i didn't see any, but the last week has apparently gotten hot enough or muggy enough or late enough that the larvae/eggs/? hatched and they are all over, and how i stood outside on my way in from class this evening and watched them in the lawn area of the complex. how sometimes all is dark, and then one flicker and then another, and just when you start to believe it, they disappear and you begin the waiting again.

only then i got hungry, because class from 6-9 has me eating at weird hours, and my new mantra is "more forks, fewer spoons" because only having four sets of silverware means that i'm conscious of what gets used and what doesn't (dinner knives). and spoons means rice krispies and yogurt and laziness, so even if i'm not really cooking, a fork feels more civilized.

so i got the last of my tomatoes from last wednesday's farmer's market out. (and thought about the tomato farmers i've encountered: both have utterly charmed me. the one last week joked about how rednecks didn't know what to do with green tomatoes until they looked at the frying pan one day and got an idea, and i laughed a real laugh for the first time in a while). and i made a caprese salad, which is such a pretentious/italian way to talk about something so simple and lovely and good. and then i sat down on my pretend couch, which is just my tomato blanket on the floor, and turned on the tv.

only by now it was 10, and the pickings were slim, what with my sixteen channels. i don't know why a converter box wasn't needed for the digital transition, and for a couple of days after i didn't bother turning on the tv because i assumed that what i had here had to be analog; every form of basic cable i've seen in the past ten years has had at least forty channels. but then i did one day, as a test, and lo and behold, there was dr. oz. so of course i shut it off immediately (because really, i hate that guy) but i made a mental note.

after realizing that i could not bear "america's got talent" and skipping past the three religious channels, i got hooked into this 48 hours mystery because the accused killer had overplucked eyebrows and i kept watching even after i started getting stressed out by watching real people's pain. i finally turned the tv off, but of course wanted to google the people in the show to see if the trial's happened (because as ridiculous as the girl's story is, i feel compelled not to convict).

and now i am left with that gross feeling from reading stuff that i know isn't good for me, the same way i feel when i read "fashion" magazines or gossip blogs or sit on facebook for more than a minute, because when i close my eyes, i don't want to see overwrought scenes where the reporter interviews the head detective on the case in a shadowy garage to emphasize the gravity of the situation.

instead, i want to think about how i am still not used to lightning bugs, so that i am startled at first each time i go outside. and how they remind me of my grandmother's house and the sliding back door, and how every time i would run near a tree to try to catch them i would think, "is this the tree that zachary taylor's brother hanged himself from?" because my mom told us once that that had happened on the property, and i carried that factoid around like a totem that signified "i am from a place with history." only i could never remember what tree it was exactly, because that didn't matter in my retellings, and so with jar in hands, i would look up and think, "is this the one?" for a second before catching up to my brother and sister and their jars.

and now i don't want to catch them anymore. but i want to capture it somehow--that looking out on an expanse of grass and gasping a little every time the lights start again. i want that to be the image that sticks, that stays.

7

my mother has coined a great term: "the big heavy." for when you're so tired that you have to go to bed rightnow or else the world might end. the big heavy usually strikes at socially-questionable times, like 7:30 pm for my mom on the couch with a book covering her face. or, like today for me, 5 pm. i was sitting in bed reading a book i bought for a dollar(!) and then the next thing i know the pillow was luring me to it and all i could do was set an alarm so i didn't sleep for hours and hours. but then of course i turned off the alarm when it rang in my half-sleep because, duh, the big heavy does not take kindly to incompleteness. and so i finally awoke at 8:30 pm, when the sky was beginning to shift to darkness. there was that lovely millisecond where i didn't know where i was exactly, but i knew that i was rested and didn't need anything.

this succumbing to the big heavy was especially satisfying because, unlike many days here this summer, i wasn't just sitting around my apartment trying to study all day. oh no! i was out, interacting with people other than clerks at meijer or whole foods. friends came to town and i talked (and listened)! to real people i didn't have to buy something from! and everyone had ties to kentucky, so i didn't have to spend too long answering the "why on earth kentucky?" or "what could you possibly see in that place?" questions.

instead i got to remember why i have answers to the questions other ask. because kentuckians know how to tell snappy stories with impeccable timing. because i got to ask "where are your people from?" which is the way my mother has always asked other people who understand how to respond: with the name of the county. kentucky has 120 counties, more than almost every other state. and the state doesn't just have counties; it cites them, counts on them, uses them. my grandmother's people are from clay county; i am most likely moving to barren county. the license plates here say the county you're from, so i've been trying to find new names: here in lexington (fayette), there's a lot of jessamines and scotts and even boyles to be found, but spotting a cumberland or magoffin? that sends me back to the map, to try to make sense of the new discovery.

a woman in my class told me about the blue fugates last week. oh lord, was i grateful for the tip. a group of people near hazard (perry county), starting with martin fugate in the early nineteenth century, intermarried for generations with another family, the smiths, and both families carried the recessive gene for a disease that plays havoc with the oxygen levels in the blood. and so a fair number of the descendents were born with dark blue skin. the best account of the blue fugates that i (well, really my mom, who read from it to me while i walked up and down the aisles at meijer) found was this.

sure, you can't help but laugh a little, but then you feel bad, because the fugates weren't mean or dangerous or deserving of as much ridicule as they got. some of them were just a little blue. or more than a little blue. but the blue fugates have stopped being blue, so now there must be those out there who hope that no one will ask them too many questions about their people, because their people are "yes, those fugates," but, if they get comfortable enough, if they trust you, they end up telling you stories about them.

because that's what people do here, even if the story is a little sad or weird. you take out the profound unsaids, of course, but you figure out what can be spiffed and spit-shined and you present it. and you make sure that your telling of it crackles. so hopefully the fugate descendents these days have found a way to toss off lines that make everyone chuckle, have found a way to pause and then say, almost-offhandedly, "and this one woman always said of aunt luna, 'she was as blue a woman as i ever saw.'" and i hope the listeners understand to respond in kind with stories of their uncle myron's foibles. because, as a good kentuckian knows, the telling must never be one-sided.

6

today was the first day the panic came. "oh god, i don't know how i'm going to pass this test." i set up camp in the living room, on the floor, and tried to still my mind by making flashcards and putting each subject's cards in a ziplock bag. i love ziplock bags, and getting to see the small pile of them grow bit by bit is almost reward enough. almost.
detritus at work; work at detritus.

but who wants to hear of worries? even though i feel they're like kudzu, creepy crawly trying to take over and conquer. this is most definitely partly due to me spending so much time by myself. today i even started talking out loud, just a little, just to see if it felt weird. "and now i'm going to sit down (sit down)!" i sang-song. "it's so lovely to sit down!" thank god there is still a difference between my outer self-voice and inner one. although maybe this is how i sound to others? have i skipped completely over the crazy cat lady stage of my life and already ended at village idiot?
i went down last friday to visit the town that i think i'm going to this fall. kentucky likes to borrow names from other places: on the way down (from lexington, natch), i passed one sign that pointed the way to boston and new haven. and now i'm going to (probably) move to a town that has a much better-known UK counterpart. i wonder if i still get to refer to myself as a glaswegian?
as much research you do beforehand: sourcing a potential CSA to join, delighting over the discovery of a local YMCA, making note of the different cultural activities, there is no substitute for going to a place and driving around. while i tried to keep from drooling over the small (five-figure!) houses nestled together on flat streets parallel to the city square, i got to see two things that i'm taking as good signs.
one, a horse and buggy filled with an amish family. this was completely unexpected--there were no amish crossing signs posted like there are in my uncle's town in michigan and my childhood stories of kentucky were full of our moonshining kin, not their bonneted neighbors--and a complete delight. would this be culture-profiling? even so, knowing that there are amish nearby makes the whole town even more fascinating. my mom found that a woman who grew up amish and wrote books on it lives in the town and we are already scheming on how to have coffee with her.
two, while stopped at a light on my way out of town, i looked over and saw a cop handcuffing a man on the side of the road. once the light changed and i was far enough away, i waved to the man getting arrested and (my inner voice) said, "hold on tight--i'll be seeing you soon."

5

oh summer southern weather, you are a hot mess. this morning it was sunny. when i left my class, it was heavy with clouds. halfway to the car, the skies opened up, and by the arby's around the corner from the parking lot i was soaked, slipping in my flip flops and grateful that my old red pants have been washed over and over. it poured for hours, cleared up, and now i can't see a cloud in the dark sky; though the air is less thick than this morning, it's as if nothing happened.
i should be used to this--summer thunderstorms. i've been in the south for the past two summers. but they don't happen in california. there, rain is for the cold season; summer is hot and dry and the hills turn brown. it is a strange reorientation--for something to relocate from one time of year to another. sort of like crossing into the southern hemisphere; since i haven't done that yet, moving to kentucky will have to do.
i went to chicago this past weekend for a friend from college's wedding. i've teared up at every friend's wedding i've gone to so far, but oh did the waterworks hit at this one. we were all in a row, weeping, watching our friend incandescently happy. i had never met the groom before; until just over two weeks ago, he was in ghana, waiting for his interview with immigration. they met when sarah studied abroad, and because i am narcissistic, this gets me thinking about how while sarah was meeting tony, i was drinking cheap brown rum in a guesthouse in india and traveling to wherever lonely planet recommended and the trains went on the weekends.
there's a lot that's frustrating about india, and studying abroad, but the hardest thing for me was the realization that no matter how properly i dressed or precisely i learned to sit still (lord do americans fidget) or correctly i bobbled my head, i would always be identifiable as an outsider. never on the inside. and sure, there's a place for well-meaning outsiders in most societies, but is it anyone's first choice of a role.
moving to kentucky is in a lot of ways much easier on the assimilation front. i don't really have an accent, but others' vary wildly (also, "the kentucky accent," if there could be such a category, is so hard to explain to people. less twang than texas; less drawl than georgia (though the "i" sound goes on for a while); more staccato than alabama. it's probably closest to the "dumb southern" stereotype mocked by much of the coasts. oh god, i've gone off on a tangent that includes listening to different kentucky dialect sound mp3 files. it's like an audio version of studs terkel). but oh man, i keep having feelings of "dear god, do i belong here?" and yeah, a lot of that has to do with not being settled. but is it ever possible to feel at home in a place other than where you grew up? my mom has been in california for half her life, and she's certainly settled, but she doesn't feel totally a piece of it. and i would like to feel connected to the place i live, even if not quite to "stars hollow" levels.
i've been spending a lot of time by myself, trip this weekend notwithstanding, and so there's all sorts of threads of thoughts that dangle in my head: how i can't stand the morning bar class because everyone laughs at stupid jokes and this guy who acts like THAT guy; how i am most likely moving this fall to a small town in southcentral kentucky, not too far from the tennessee border; how much i liked the guy at the farmers' market who sold me tomatoes (gruff, totally country, not a bougie bone in his body, loved his tomatoes dearly) and i bought $9 of them, the elderly woman living below me who is the source of the smoke that comes through my vents sometimes and how i like to watch her walk in the evenings. so many things, but now it's time for my nightly crossword puzzle and so i finish with two thousand words of other duly noted amazements (well, plus the brief caption blurbs.).
we went out to brunch in chicago, and the water stain under my plate looked just like ben franklin! well, after he ran into a wall, i guess.
i made swiss chard chips tonight! they weren't that good, but of course i was too proud not to eat them all right way.

4

i'm sleeping with the windows open, even in the living room. one, i don't think anyone is going to climb up a story to get in my apartment--last week i left the keys in the door all night and they were there safe and sound when i finally discovered them after a frenzied search. two, it's raining, hard, and i like the sound--past the pitter patter and almost like a shower nozzle on full blast. three, i'm sick of air conditioning. sometimes my apartment smells like stale smoke. i bought (at meijer of course) odor eaters and the main room has gotten a lot better, but the smell returns when the A/C starts pumping. and i've spent hours cooped up in the car today and this week, driving from one possible future locale to another. i hate that time when the car A/C is too cold but no A/C is too hot, and you try to fiddle with the temperature control only it never gets quite right.
today i went to go visit the most isolated, rural possibility. it's a little over two hours; the first half is on the interstate, but then you get on a state highway and enter daniel boone national forest and the hills rise sharply around you and you start to wind and climb and pretty soon it's just you and one industrial truck that is leading you into the unknown.

and you manage to finally tune the radio into a station, and miraculously it's npr. well, the first one is some bible network that's interviewing a guy and you stop to listen to it for a minute, all the while thinking "it's good for me to listen to what other people think about" and first you hear a lady caller talking about how sick she is of people who feel morally superior and always tell her what to read and think and act, and you even find yourself nodding your head. but then the real focus of the show, some guy who wrote a book about the ten most dangerous books ever written, comes back on and starts talking and just after he says, "sometimes i'm kept up at night worrying about how much america has started to look like lenin's writings" you hit the seek button in disgust and find npr and melissa block's soothing voice and robert siegel's slightly-grating one.
so anyways, this forest keeps going. every now and then there's a sign of life: a trailer on the side of the road, a sign for another small town, but the hills keep winding and the trees are so green you almost think they're painted, and now the voice on the radio is a guy embedded with the army in afghanistan, and it's ostensibly a piece about peace-keeping but it turns into one about an afghani gas station owner who's been kidnapped, and the sub-governor of the region is affiliated with the kidnappers, and the american military guys--kids really, because they're all younger than you--are holding a meeting trying to calm the townspeople down, and all of a sudden there's this horrible wailing coming through the speakers. a man is crying. it's the brother of the kidnapped man, but you don't understand exactly who it is at first. you're driving in rural eastern kentucky and the treeline rises and falls and there's no houses in sight and the truck is still in front of you (he hasn't pulled over to let you pass yet; you haven't tried) and an afghani man is wailing, filling the car with shrieks. and even though the reporter's voice comes on now to explain and contextualize and distance and even though you know that you're not in afghanistan--you're not sure what the afghan landscape looks like, but you're pretty sure that it's not just like appalachia--you have this feeling so pounding that this feeling will return if you are placed out here. that this will happen again.