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++++++++++++

Stalking
Lone Star Thomas
Goodies

phone home

6/27/03
Wednesday night, after my class, on the Union Square N/R/W/Q platform I thought I saw this Australian (I don’t think she was British, so I’m just assuming she’s Australian) woman out of the corner of my eye who only came to the first two classes, and didn’t turn any work in the day it was due. I’d totally forgotten about her, and wasn’t even sure if it was her on the platform, the image was fleeting and peripheral. It could’ve been some figment of my conscience since I really don’t care for this class, but feel guilty for wanting to drop out (and the damn thing’s free so it’s some stupid quitter issue). I thought perhaps it was a sign of some sort. Then, this afternoon I know for a fact I saw this woman in Union Square station. That’s very random, I never run into people I know or even know of, in the city, especially not in the same place at totally different times. Wed. it was evening, today it was lunchtime. Now I know it’s a sign that I need to get the hell out of this class. I already know I’m a hack, and my critiques always revolve around how I make good use of detail but need to add dialogue. I’m too retarded to re-create dialogue, I don’t know why, it just always eludes me. But I’d be willing to work on it, if I could bear (jesus, I almost typed bare as if I was true New Yorker) sitting through each session. I knew I was asking for trouble taking a class called Finding Your Voice in Nonfiction, but I was hoping people would be accomplished enough to realize the difference between personal essays, journal/diary entries, and therapy. Wed. there was some piece about a dad’s death and everyone got teary and by the end of class, there was a huddle of women bawling together in the hall and I was beyond disturbed. Death is sad, dads dying is sad, making students who want to improve their writing listen to dead dad stories is sadder. That’s not how I want to spend my pseudo-educational free-time. And it just irritates me that these classes are always 98% women and how that translates to weirdly emotional girly group behavior. I’m not saying you can’t be sad, or express feelings or bond with other females, there’s just a time and a place. I think that Aussie quitter was on to something. I don’t know if I can go back. It could be dead dads one week, then periods, love of chocolate and dread of swimsuit season the next.

6/24/03
Last year I got all excited by the new Heinz Funky Fries, in grotesque flavors like chocolate and well, funky colors like sky blue, and went crazy trying to find them. I never did around these parts. And now they’re discontinuing them. Bastards. Now I really need to get my hands on a bag. I don’t know why everyone always has to go and ruin my novelty food fun. At least those Uh Oh Oreos are still around. You know, I’ve been wondering what people feed pets in Asia, like what sort of cat food they make (insert lame joke about how they eat cats and dogs, not feed them). Is it wet, dry, in boxes, cans? I can’t wait to check out the grocery stores in Bangkok. I’ve also discovered that Singapore has all the great chains like T.G.I.Fridays, KFC, Hard Rock Café, Subway and Hooters! (insert additional lame joke how Asians don’t have the proper enormous assets to do justice to a place with a name like Hooters.) Anyway, it’s my day off, it’s hot, and I’d much rather ramble about chain food and supermarkets than weed my yard and go to the gym and write a pointless personal essay for class (I’ve given up on that genre, I don’t have the brain for formality)…but what can you do?

6/20/03
OK, I don’t know if this is the sort of thing you’re supposed to get angry about, but I’m hopping mad. It doesn’t seem major, but Tuesday I came home from being out and about all weekend and considered dealing with the rapidly growing weeds in my backyard (due to the crazy jungle weather we’ve been having the past few weeks, my yard is a serious rain forest). I look out my window and notice that one of my trees is missing. I have two, I’m not particularly fond of them, I’m not a fan of nature, plants, and my yard in particular (I’ve never owned a houseplant). I could take or leave this living, breathing greenery. Frankly, it’s kind of creepy. But I was like what the fuck happened here. It’s not enough that the tree has apparently been chopped down, but that all the branches and crap are all piled in my yard making an even more cumbersome eyesore. I know it must have to do with having a car keyed earlier in the month and the kids who won’t play anywhere except in front of my window (I’ve decided to tell them to fuck off to their own homes—I mean would their mothers appreciate me sitting in front of their windows yelling, screaming, throwing things, swearing like a sailor? These aren’t unruly teens, we’re talking about boys in the 8-11 year old range. I don’t care if I become the mean lady on the block, I’ve had it. And I never ever see kids playing in front of anyone else’s apts. on the entire block) but I’ve had it with this shitty neighborhood. I don’t know what’s wrong with people, but I’m beyond furious. The only people with access to my backyard (you literally have to go through my front door and my apt. to get back there) are the neighbors on my right, there’s about a three-foot stretch where the fence doesn’t meet snugly. But I don’t get why they would chop my tree down. It’s this Mexican family who keeps to themselves, and are always pleasant enough, I say hi if I see them, which is nicer than I am with most neighbors (unless I’m drunk, then I’ll smile and say hi to the freaky elderly women on the block who are always peeking out their curtains or outside sweeping. People that sweep the outdoors worry me.). The tree wasn’t huge, it wasn’t in full bloom yet, it wasn’t blocking any view (the only view is of backs of apt. buildings, anyway) it wasn’t sprawling onto their property, it wasn’t dropping crap onto their yard. It’s a total stupid mystery and I’m livid. Maybe a normal person would call the landlord and knock on the neighbors’ door and see what was going on. But that’s the last thing I feel like doing. Everyone says to call the landlord and make sure he didn’t do it before jumping to conclusions, but that’s completely improbable. My window shattered in a windstorm over a year ago and it’s never been replaced, I can’t imagine him showing up in the middle of the month when the rent isn’t due, going into my apt. when I’m not home (is that allowed?) charging into my backyard, chopping a tree down, and taking off? That’s a lot of effort for not a lot of result, not to mention totally bizarre behavior. I tend to take life’s little annoyances way too personally, and why not. I started having an internal fit this week as the weather warmed up and it started becoming apparent that my new work space was not properly climate controlled. This is a huge beef of mine, it’s been mentioned before. The two signs you’re at a total shitty job are that instead of hiring new people they have mothers in remote locations doing data entry and that there is no air conditioning. The former has happened twice, the latter four times. What are the odds? The rest of the library is air conditioned, it’s just the slide collection that seems to have trouble. It turned out that the AC was on, but was being sabotaged since the heat was also still on. Neither were things we could control manually. Then I noticed a dead rat on the ledge outside the new window I sit next to. Yes, I take it very personally. Anyway, this weekend will be filled with all sorts of wedding goodness. A coworker (and interestingly, also a college friend of James’ that he went on a date with once) of mine is tying the knot tomorrow, but being done on a library salary no one except family and close friends are invited. I’ll be lucky if I could even afford to invite family (not that they’d attend, no one went to my sister’s wedding from my family except me). We just threw her a party at work using library money to buy two big, cheap bottles of wine and some hummus and olives (and a nice Waring blender on her registry—Bed, Bath, and Beyond—so practical) and everyone got crazy drunk in less than an hour and started yelling and fighting and I told my new supervisor that all her student workers are lazy and disrespectful and that they shouldn’t hire so many art school girls because it causes trouble. We were supposed to take her to a bar but after polishing off the wine no one could function well enough. On the other end of the spectrum, one of James’s coworkers is getting married on some indeterminate date, and I’m sure will be going whole hog. He and the fiancée (who looks like a little Chinese boy, seriously) will be moving to England (where he’s from) and doing some crazy official Church of England thing with lots of rules. We are going to the engagement party tomorrow at someone’s home on the Upper East Side and that scares me. I don’t even know what engagement parties mean, there was an RSVP so I suppose that’s relatively formal, I don’t know these people well. I hope it’s not a sit down dinner (it’s a Larry David incident waiting to happen). Will it be family, stuffy friends I don’t know, James’s coworkers he doesn’t want to see outside of work? Ack. There’s a world of difference between a financial industry wedding and an academic library version.

6/16/03

I’d nearly forgotten the feeling of coming home so late that when you get out of the subway station the sun is starting to come up. It’s a good feeling. However, waking up ill at 1pm is not such a good feeling. I don’t see how alcoholics ever get anything done (do they get hangovers or do they just keep drinking?). I never thought I’d say that I miss riding the subway, drunk in the wee hours, and I don’t completely. But there was something likeable about wandering around the streets with nearly no one on them, early-shift people heading to work. When I’d go to get a bagel on the corner around 2pm baker would tell me how he saw me coming home late/early. I don’t have corner places like that anymore, just blah pizza and White Castle (I’m not complaining about the latter) and I don’t go home on weekends anyway. Now I’m spoiled. I really lucked out choosing to go to S.E. Asia at this point in time. I’d been waiting and hoping that all the SARS hysteria would get reflected in airfare. It hadn’t really, tickets were in the $800-900 range about a month ago, then I saw deals in the high $600s and thought I should just buy. Then earlier this week I heard there was going to be a Singapore Airlines sale from Wed. to Sat. with RT tickets for $249, which is totally insane. The catch was that there were only 2,000 allotted for the U.S. and no matter how hard I tried to get on the site, the fares would either be $8,000 or I’d get an error message. The phone lines were busy too (there was a $40 extra charge for making phone reservations, too). It was totally infuriating. There were also supposed to be tickets for $499 since this was a half-off sale, but those were limited as well. I literally tried all day to get tickets to no avail. We totally ended up getting into a fight over these tickets, I got told to fuck off (funny, I was also told to fuck off at a party last weekend…could it be that I’m…overbearing?) which is crazy because we don’t generally have real fights. I just like to plan (he doesn’t like to plan, which is such a P trait. I’ll never understand people who wing it and show up whenever, wherever, practically everyone I know except family members who are all J’s is like that) and get crazy about having things work out right, goddamn it. This was around midnight, and James was going out of town in four hours for his sister’s PhD graduation and said he’d try calling and if it didn’t work he’d just do the $750 NW airlines thing we were originally planning. I woke up first thing and was actually able to finagle the $499 fare. I freaked out that I had found a winning combination of dates, and flights and immediately bought tickets in a panic. Then I remembered that James was supposed to be buying tickets that morning. I knew he’d have a layover in Denver so I left a bunch of messages not to by tickets. He never called back. Not once. Then I get an email message around 8pm with our itinerary. He’d gone and bought tickets. Apparently his cell phone wasn’t working on the west coast. Urgh, so we had four non-refundable tickets to Singapore, which really sucked. Luckily, Orbitz does a one-time refund if you call within 24 hours. Phew. I was completely spazzed-out. I don’t know why I get worked up over these things. I hope this trip doesn’t turn into a huge trauma.

6/9/03
I re-found my fortune cookie fortune from my last Portland visit in Nov. “Do not be intimidated by the eloquence of others.” I don’t know why that cracks me up so much. I don’t really think I’m intimidated by eloquence, though I wasn’t feeling like going to my class tonight because my writing pretty much sucks. I guess you could say it’s ineloquent. I was planning on throwing in the towel and not coming back to class, just because I have other time-sucking things to do (I really wished I had signed up for the Mandarin Chinese class like I’d originally wanted to). But the teacher read four of the twenty or so essays the class had written aloud for critique, and it appeared she’d intentionally chosen them and that they were the better of the bunch, and mine got read second, and had the unbelievable comment, “from beginning to end, I know I’m in the hands of a truly confident and skillful writer” written on it, which is totally insane because I have zero (perhaps even less than zero) confidence, but heck, if I’m able to fool the instructor with my false authoritativeness, so be it. I think I’m just used to writing workshops being harsher and more critical, like the food writing one I took last summer had more than half the students drop-out (I always left the class feeling totally beat up and useless, but damn, I was going to get my $500 worth). So, now of course I’d feel like a loser for dropping out like I wanted to. Maybe I was all worried for nothing. Do you know what makes you feel like a real adult? Attending conferences. I just don’t get the whole concept. Last week I went with a few coworkers to some Luna Imaging (I don’t even know what this Luna software is really, but it has to do with the new job at the same library that I started last week) thing at Rutgers and three of us totally ended up cramming piles of cookies into our purses like old women, then sneaking out early. Lots of library folk in a small, enclosed space is scary. There were only about 40 or so at this thing, but this week I’ve been attending this annual Special Libraries Association conference, which is a big deal and expensive and thousands come from all over the world, and I’m only attending because it happens to be in NYC and I pay a student rate (which I’m hoping to get reimbursed for). It’s the only time I feel interesting or special—when talking to out-of-towners. Like everyone’s impressed that you live in NYC. And you must remember that I’m dealing with librarians, who hate to be stereotyped, despite the fact that 80% of them fit the freaky, socially inept stereotype, so it doesn’t take a lot to impress (thank god). Last night I just attended this news division newcomers reception (which was totally scary. I got there right on time because I’m a freak and there was only a handful of like over 50 people sitting on couches eating cheese. Luckily, I didn’t walk in, just past, so I could wait it out for 20 min. to see if anyone else would show—there were a few youngish, interesting people, but just a few) and drank all the free wine I could and then chatting with strange “special” librarians (special meaning, business or corporate rather than academic, public or school, but we all know what specialreally means) didn’t seem so painful. So, I don’t know what you’re supposed to do at these things. I guess I’ll go attend some lectures or panel discussions or network or whatever it is they do, and pretend I know what’s what. I think my focus will be on freebies. Yes, I need to add to my current commemorative collection of pins—yesterday I was given a gold apple (like the Big Apple, I guess?) and an enamel Statue of Liberty montage. Who knows what wonders tomorrow holds? I’m not yet sure if I should be frightened that this is what my life has become.

6/6/03
OK, this ad is really starting to get on my nerves. It’s been displayed next to my hotmail messages when I’m composing or reading for at least the past week. And I keep hoping someone will notice that thats needs an apostrophe. But no. This is some big MSN ad, can’t they get it right. When I just typed thats Word did that annoying auto correct thing, then underlined it red after I forced it to leave off the apostrophe. It’s glaring, I tell you. I really don’t have the desire to write finely crafted personal essays. . I’m totally uninspired to crank out another dull 800 word specimen for next week’s class. I just don’t. I’m illiterate and simple-minded and I only want to write about stuff. Stuff like how Mothman Prophecies and Dragonfly, which both seem to be on cable a lot lately, are like the same movie, though Dragonfly is definitely more insipid. They both have insects in their titles. Both have middle-aged, handsome-ish charcters (Richard Gere and Kevin Costner) who have dead wives that can’t get over, and all sorts of supernatural stuff happens, moved objects, phone calls from beyond, lots of wind and they get obsessed and drawn into a web of mystery and almost die and everyone thinks they’re crazy, but in the end they are at least partly proven right, despite their crackpot convictions. Both have suspenseful endings involving diving into water and freeing someone stuck in a vehicle. Richard Gere just gets to a bridge in Virginia or somewhere unimportant in time to save his love interest from drowning. But Kevin Costner, boy, he goes all the way the Amazon and finds some isolated tribe who is hostile at first, but it turns out they have his newborn baby he didn’t even know he had, in a hut. It’s really for the best that I don’t have cable or even less would get done than already does. I have to stop myself before I get into that so-so new Showtime Sunday drama with Eric Stoltz and Justine Bateman and how horrible “Life or Something Like it” is and wanting to see the end, hoping Angelina Jolie really would die kept me up past 3am last night. Time-wasters, all these TV offerings. How can I become a brilliant personal essayist with all these bad shows vying for my attention. Ack, I don’t even watch TV at home (where I’m at for the next few hours) and instead of starting my assignment I’m going to now go listen to my Thai language learning cassette and practice those curly, scrawly letters—anything but write thoughtfully.