To make sure no uncouth youth organized over MySpace to terrorize South Street again this weekend, on Saturday night, the street was completely shut down.

Buses, paddy wagons, mounted police and officers chillin’ at every intersection. The officer Melissa approached would only be vague about the “juveniles” and their underage drinking.

While I do support a proactive attitude toward crime, it’s hard in the city of Philadelphia to not feel like such a single-minded dedication of resources to the Center City bar district might be a little pennywise, pound foolish.

But what do I know.

http://www.ecosalon.com/boost-metabolism/

This mostly describes my diet! Minus turkey and grapefruit.

Which may be an indictment against the truthfulness of story.

Also, what is that a picture of that goes with the green tea? Some kind of moon rock?

One of my Fulbright classmates just finished grad school (which I know because of gchat) and I feel like I’ve done less with my life…

My mom was hard to reach.

After trying the house phone, her cell, and my dad’s cell—for the second time—I thought maybe I wouldn’t bother. What a manufactured occasion anyway, and my mom hates the obligations of holidays.

Then I thought about how three years ago I was worried she’d die of cancer while I was living abroad.

So I called again and caught her. She’d had to work. Had gotten margaritas with Dad after. “We do what we can,” she said, and we talked for a half hour about my sister’s impending graduation, house plants and the rugs she can get cheap from work, if we need more rugs.  She has an olive green one in mind for me.  And probably half the actual time of our conversation is—as is customary—the silences between topics until we can think of something else to say.

I’ve been delegated the responsibility of making reservations for lunch on graduation day.  Let’s not forget.

Why u shine light on mah bizness?

I had to stop working because it’s less than 12 hours until I have to be at work again.  No good.  

Neither was the text that I was editing.  

Just kidding.

Jenne and I talked on the trolley last night about how hard it is to find time to be independently creative around the hours we keep for work.  I think I’ve realized that I can’t do this job and succeed in any ambitions to be a writer.

And when I decide to be depressed about work, that’s usually one of the things I let get me down.

In our senior seminar, Michael Byers said “There’s no writing but writing.”

Or something to that effect, which just means that it doesn’t matter how brilliant you are in your head if you never put your ideas to paper.

So I am now exploring the (potential) corollary that *all* writing is writing, including Tweets.

What literary ambitions can be realized in 140 characters or less?  Remains to be seen.

As Melissa pointed out, Twitter is all about narcissism.  Well, so is being a writer.  You have to be more than a little self-absorbed to embark on a career that assumes *your* particular take on life—or the facts of your life itself—will sell books.

And for myself, I did the most writing at a time in my life when I was most fascinated by the details of my surroundings. In all honesty, I am hoping to find something valuable, though so far my tweets have crossed subjects from dirty underwear to cherry blossoms and I posted a picture of my breakfast.

It’s only day 2.

Whatever comes of it, I’m pretty stoked that I can now follow the former host of Reading Rainbow.

I’Z NOT UNDERSTAND DIS TWITTER.

I am sitting at my computer, not really watching the television, which is on in the background.  Putzing on the internet and drinking SoCo and lime.  It was a warm day.  I have a lot to do at work.  I’m feeling lower today than usual about work, but finally it is still light out at 6 when I am still there, which makes it feel easier.

I get an e-mail.  Subject: “Sad news from India.”

I hope everyone is doing well in their respective lives. I writing to inform you guys of some sad news. Mummom passed away a few weeks ago in her sleep. They think it was a brain aneurysm. I just thought everyone should know. We had some amazing times together at her house. I am grateful to have been there with all of you.

The day that we met, she asked us to call her mom.  I’d e-mailed my real mother saying that I had a “new mother,” which I think she took the wrong way, but it was just that I instantly felt so taken care of.

The day that we left, we gave her a toaster as a parting gift, because she’d always talked about getting one.  She unwrapped the box, stared at, and started to cry.  I’m an in-the-closet sentimental and I cried, too.  The last things she ever asked me to do was call.  But then I never did.  And that was three years ago.

I can’t come up with a non-cliche to respond with in reply-all.  We’re all richer for having known her.  She will be missed. May she rest in peace.

I think about the ghats, where bereaved men shave their heads and women wash their hair in the Ganga.  

The “octo-mom” is on the news because she just got a new mansion, the weather will be colder tomorrow, and in the Lake District of Kolkata, a city of 7.8 million, Mukta Sengupta is no longer there.

“Death is not extinguishing the light; it is only putting out the lamp because the dawn has come.” -Rabindranath Tagore

1. On the Boston red line, a homeless man tried to give his bible to the woman sitting across from him. It’s one of those things—you try not to pay attention to the people who are sort of yelling across the subway car in a confrontational manner, but when I did look over, she was crying, clutching his arm, and saying that she didn’t want to go to hell.

I didn’t dwell in it, but I felt a moment of empathy. Imagine feeling so rock-bottom shitty in your life that a man with a frog’s voice in a dirty trucker hat and sweatshirt, who by his own admission can’t read the bible in his hand, is the person who is providing you moral comfort.

Consider that in our world, no one better dressed on that train would.

2. And, then I went to a bar with $4 in my wallet.

How much is a shot of Jameson, I asked.

$5.50, the bartender said.

I’ll have a PBR, I said.

The man standing next to me turned, held out his hand to shake: I’m Luke, and that’s the best order that I’ve ever heard, he said.

1. 1 hr of roll over and don’t get out of bed.
2. 1 dash cat sleeping on backs of knees
3. 10 cups coffee
4. 1 part relief to have no obligations, 1 part nagging sense that you should be making more of your life, 1 part “it’s early and there are so many possibilities for this day.”
5. 5 news related websites
6. 2 podcasts
7. 1 messy house
8. 1 sewing machine
9. 1 sewing project
10. Irish whiskey, to taste.
11. 1 tbsp vinegar

Directions:

Combine ingredients, let set.  Reserve one portion of #4; add vinegar at bedtime; possibilities for the day sour into possibilities unrealized;  fold into sleep.

In other news, one of my clients was on the plane that crashed in Denver.

Did you twitter from your blackberry, I asked?

Didn’t have one at the time, he said, but have an iPhone as a result.

And we’re 24 hours until the working class of Philadelphia don their blush and sequins. I can’t wait for Mummers.

Philadelphia NBC news just spent 45 seconds of airtime talking about the 4 Israelis killed by Hamas bombing and featured an Israeli scholar of some kind saying, and I paraphrase, “we cannot say Israel and Palestine are equally blamed, because they are not. There is one side that is targeting civilians and hiding behind civilians, and that is Hamas, and they are to blame.”

345. Three hundred and forty five Palestinians have died. The cognitive dissonance is deafening.

The anchors mention pro-Palestinian protesters who gathered on Market Street. But only to say that they are there.

I just spent half my day trying to retrieve a rental car from Philadelphia’s impound lot #1. They were supposed to open at 2, then they amended it to 4, and then the cashier was an hour late to work.

It was farcical. Thousands of dollars stood in line, unable to retrieve our cars because the one person able to accept money wasn’t there.

Like, if the rest of y’all don’t know how to use the cash register we’re across the parking lot from Ikea. Really, this shouldn’t be the problem.

And I got really angry. It wasn’t even my car, I came along for moral support and just sat on the box of Cristen’s new space heater.

But the bitch cashier came an hour late to work and answered her cell phone while someone was trying to pay $200 to get her car back.

And why would you accuse a woman of trying to pass fake money last night after you made very clear that you never spoke to her and knew nothing about her being there the night before and being told she wouldn’t be charged for an extra day because the people who were there couldn’t take her money—two $100 bills—why do that?

I can’t swear I’m not making this up, but they treated everyone like people who’d done something wrong, not people who misstepped trying to navigate the world of inconsistently applied human rules. And I mean, in Philly, parking rules are inconsistently applied.

Once we finally had the damn car—with a tow sticker on the window that wouldn’t come off—we drove down Oregon Ave past cars parked up on the concrete median, and I thought, “That’s free money for the city, so why don’t they tow them?”

The fact that they don’t, and the death toll in Gaza confirm that there’s no justice in the world.

As for President-elect Obama . . . have them write up a presidential order for Jan. 20 saying that America will not employ torture, and maybe issue a blanket presidential pardon for your predecessor and his vice, and then set about the business of disappointing your followers and astonishing your enemies and doing what is right for our country.

Garrison Keillor

Polls just closed in Colorado.  Halleluja.

And I may not actually be able to vote.  As of yet my absentee hasn’t arrived, and it has to be postmarked by today.  I kind of want to cry about it.

My horoscope in the CSU student paper: Calm down or you won’t finish what you need to get done.  Be motivated and don’t let unimprotant things eat away at you.  The sweetest revenge is your own success.

For all of my personal insecurities, I have never actually been the worst at anything.  This fact has helped me through life on occasion.  However badly I may have done, at least someone else was always at the bottom.  Until now. 

By the numbers I am literally the worst campus organizer in the state of Colorado.  Sigh. 
and last night may have been the worst of my life.  

Which is being melodramatic, but when hyperventalating outside in the cold and dark at 11:30 pm and planning for the next, impossible seeming day still to do, it didn’t feel like an unreasonable statement.  I am not a person who doesn’t eat, but I have been so full of anxiety that there has not been room for food.  Today is the first day since I arrived that I have made a place for three instances of food consumption in my day.  My numbers didn’t improve, but my mood has.  Slightly.  I thought nothing could phase me anymore, but this is the most stressful thing I have ever done, by far.

Life is madness.  I have never worked so hard or long in a single day and felt like I got literally nothing done.

Let me tell you about the last 12 hours.  At 11pm last night I was informed that after returning my rental car to Philadelphia, I would be traveling to Richmond, VA for a training to replace the now defunct training in Denver that the organization paid $400 to fly me to in September.  Plans change.  We expected to leave York around 6pm, get to VA by midnight.

At 7:45 am this morning we were informed we should close our office here by 3 o’clock and head out to Philly, arriving in VA much earlier.  During the 5 minutes that I was in the bathroom around 8:30 am, we got another call and I was told to check my e-mail.  My e-mail tells me that I have a plane ticket to Denver for 6:45 am Tuesday morning.

This means that in all likelihood I will be in either CO or NM for the next month.  So either I will need the winter acoutrements that I am going to throw in my bag tonight, or I won’t at all.  The upshot is that I will get to spend tonight in my house.

I had a very homesick afternoon last week.  I was canvassing and someone yelled at me for asking him multiple times if he was registered to vote at his current address.  He was an angry young man sitting around on a weekday morning in a neighborhood where drugs are reportedly traded, so I shouldn’t take it personally, but I wanted very intensely in that moment to pack up my bags and say goodbye to the whole project.  I keep telling myself that I’m no quitter.

I wish I had both the time and a computer to blog on more regularly.  I am staying in the home of two Quakers in York, Pennsylvania while assistant directing in a voter registration canvass office.  We are only being paid to register black people, so I have become a strange kind of racial profiler.  Anytime I see a black person, on reflex I think “I wonder if they’re registered.”  York Pennsylvania has it’s share, but is not exactly swimming in diversity.  This makes our job a challenge, especially with Wal*Mart’s strict no soliciting policy. Our canvassers literally hide behind cars in the parking lot to not be caught.

This morning, one of our staff who couldn’t come in for the longest time because his dog had bitten his face had to call out because yesterday he was RUN OVER BY A CAR.  I saw him riding in the car with his fiancee just this afternoon, and he is in full leg casts.  Yet is still bizarrely cheerful and talkative.  I would not be cheerful if I had multiple children I had hoped to support on a canvasser’s salary only to be mowed down in an alley by fat people.

He specifically mentioned this fact on the phone, that it was a small car driven by fat people, with therefore little ground clearance, leading to additional injury.

People call me “baby” more often than I would like when I am canvassing, and yesterday a crazy man outside the Turkey Hill who first showed me an envelope with a note on it saying he had $200 of someone else’s money that he would return by X date tried to kiss my hand.

The woman that we’re staying with was this afternoon part of a two person protest at the corner of George and Market against an invasion of Iran.

I am so glad that the registration deadline is Monday, however no one has told me where I am going next.  I have to return a rental car in Philly, but then, who knows?  We may not even be working in Pennsylvania on our voter contact project.  Seems like the state is getting pretty blue.

So I basically told my boss I wasn’t interested in electoral work.  I felt like a pussy, but I didn’t say yes just because I knew it would please other people for me to say it.

And then I actually talked to my peers about it.

Which I hadn’t before only because it’s hard to go to someone you respect, who has dedicated a lot of hours, summers, years to this kind of work, and say “I think your job suck(s)(ed).  I know it’s the backbone of this organization, but I don’t think I want to do it.  What say you?”

That’s not quite accurate, though.  I observe the workings of the canvass office and am fairly in awe of the people who do it—well most of them—and worry that I’d fall into the category of those who can’t hack it.  So really, my hesitation is all about fear of failure.

The same day that I said no, there was an event for resident Philadelphia alums and current employees of our network of organizations.  I ate little pieces of toast in a bourgeois old city bar, drank $6 bottles of lager, and hung out with really cool people.  I’m a difficult person to impress, yet I find it hard not to like almost everyone I have ever met through my job.

Afterwards, a crowd of us went to a restaurant with a seventies themed decor and reputation for comfort food.  We were a former state director, an alum of the graphics department, my boss, me, a field manager, and the director of a voter registration project.  We eat, we talk about pets and how bad people are at writing cover letters.

On the way back, Adam is telling me that their intern turned up his nose at canvassing as part of his internship. The only things I know about the intern is that he has a serious face and a hairy neck.

If you’re smart, Adam says, and you’re outgoing, you can do it.  Like, I think you can do it.

So I say a little, finally, about how unhappy I think that I would be.

Of course, he says, it’s hard when you start.  There’s nothing natural about going out and asking people for money.

Which goes into the compost mill of my brain.  And the next evening, sometime after six I get in a long conversation with my coworker about what it’s like to do electoral work, specifically.  He worked for MoveOn in 2004.

It’s interesting how when you talk about something you love, the details fade away.  Justin loved the work.

All this time, I’ve had my head in a hole that is the details—will I have to move? what will I do, specifically? if I would spend 15 hours of my day at something, how can you not tell me hour by hour what I will be asked to do?

The people I met there, he said, it’s like, if I ever saw them again there would be an instant connection because we went through this thing together.

And the next day I sent my boss a follow up e-mail saying only that my perspective had shifted, and if I could work in Philly, at least primarily, then I would do it.  I know of couches in Pittsburgh, that could be OK, too.  Just my luck, PA is a swing state.

What persuaded me in the end was the simple reminder that I would be part of a team.

I’m still sure it will be painful, but there would be company.  How could I have overlooked this?

I have a decision to make.  In, like, two days, and I have been thinking about it for months without coming to any conclusion.  That decision is whether or not to do electoral work this fall.  Really, it is a small decision: What will I get paid to do during September and October of this year?

Either I will continue doing what I am doing now, or I will switch over to campaign organizing through the first week of November.  I don’t know what this would actually entail, but I can guess.  Surely there will be canvassing. There will be phones and voter registration cards, but I am being asked to sign on to principle and let the particulars fall where they may.

If I decide not to, am I punking out on social change?  On my walk home, I think of a word: dread

My three months in Kolkata.  Every weekday morning we went to volunteer.  And every morning that I waited for the car to pick us up, I dreaded going.  Every morning: I had to go again and greet those little girls, those teenage girls, those young women with their their dead, poor, sometimes unknown mothers, their faces full of joy and life, their smiles and their dances, their sadness, and face the yawning meaninglessness of my own comfortable life.  My impotence to change anything.  The fact that whatever purpose I served by passing through their lives, they would possibly never stand in a hot shower on a cold winter morning.

And every single day of my life as a foreign English teacher in Korea, I got out of bed with dread.  I went in to school early so that I could make my instant coffee and have time to sip it before my class.  But the whole half hour, I couldn’t keep my eyes off the clock, dreading that 8 o’clock would arrive and I would have to stand in front of a classroom of girls and run a dubiously useful lesson—again.

Then the lesson would end, and I’d go back to my desk and dread the next class, even if things had gone well.  I dreaded that my mother would die of cancer while I was away and that it would turn out to be the worst decision of my life to go, to stay.

What a dark way to look back on the whole experience—one that was also full of smiles and reward and humor—but still feels more like something survived than something lived.

I can imagine my life if I answered this progressive call to arms: waking up every morning with dread in my mouth and crusted around my bloodshot eyes.

I’m sure I could survive two months of it, I’m sure I would do well enough, and I’m sure it would be worthwhile.  I would make new friends, and though I wouldn’t do much else, I would be able to say that my work reflected my values and that it was worth doing.

I could do something I hate for a purpose greater than myself.

Grow.

As much as I try to bring it back to the real issue at hand—doing a job—and the purpose—getting Democrats in office—it feels like a form of self-mutilation. And the people I know who are organizers, who excel at this, I drink with them at the bar and just wonder at how different the stuff is that we are respectively made of.

They tell smilingly stories of things that I am sure would have made me crazy.  What do you mean that you ran your office out of a Wendy’s and that you’ve been living on other people’s couches for months?

Right now, I’m doing a job that I do not dread every morning.  Unlike teaching, unlike volunteering, in this job I can sublimate my need for tangible meaning into the pieces of paper I produce—newsletters and brochures, annual reports and e-mail alerts—which seem to matter to people.

I hate to give that up for that higher order of work in which you put your energy out into the world and don’t know what will come of it

It’s quarter to seven, I’m about to leave the office and I know there’s no one at home. I’ve shut a certain person out of my life, as I occasionally do, and everyone else is otherwise occupied or in California. There is no one for me to call. I feel glum and don’t want to be alone.

I have the impulse to blanket this Tuesday night melancholy in food. Doesn’t help that I am famished. Although I think it’s sort of offensive for someone like me to ever use the word famished. What I mean to say is: I left work wanting to indulge my body in whatever would make it feel good.

Complicating factor: I am breaking out in hives, all over, and for no apparent reason. Right now the worst of it is under my bra.

So I indulge. In Whole foods. First item: a carton of strawberries to eat with the remainder of the corn pancake batter that is in my fridge. Though I will make it into pancakes first, you understand. Also, lettuce because I have only just discovered the glory of balsamic vinegarette (I’m slow to catch on to trends) and now I crave it.

I am trying not to scratch myself inappropriately in public as I select the fixings for what I’ve decided I will eat for dinner: English muffins and two kinds of cheese—English muffin pizza. It is so hard because I am so itchy!

All-natural lime popsicles I take because they make my mouth water when I see them, and they remind me of the summer I lived in Shadyside with my first roommate, who came from a well-off Unitarian family and was the first person to introduce me to Whole Foods. My relationship with this roommate didn’t end well, but all these popsicles make me think of is how much I enjoyed when she brought them home.

I impulsively purchase all natural cheese crackers, because I don’t like to let myself have Cheez-its—hydrogenated fat, high fructose corn syrup, and all that jazz. Lastly, at the register, I put the Atlantic’s summer fiction issue on the belt. I feel better than if I’d gotten Chinese takeout.

I was rejected from the Atlantic once—the first publication to which I’ve ever dared submit a piece of fiction. And a few months later, I received the neat little pre-printed rejection note on a small piece of beige paper with the addition: “Sorry,” and the initials of the fiction editor penned in purple ink. I don’t know that anything has given me more optimism about my prospects as a writer than the fact of that word, which he bothered to write by hand.

I walk home listening to an audiobook about China. I pause it as I pass the Asian Buddhist Alliance. (Or Asia Buddhist Alliance, depending which sign you read.) The side of the building is brightly painted with Buddhist murals, and there is a statue of slender Shakyamuni behind the closed gate in front. I hear monks chanting. I can’t tell if it is a recording being broadcast, but I hope that it isn’t. I hope that someone is really in there, sketching in the air with the smoke of burning incense while he prays.

The building is located behind the Sav-A-Lot food mart, where you have to check your bags with the security guard at the front. He tags them with clothespins and hands you a number written in Sharpie marker on a cutout of corrugated cardboard. There is a turnstile. It is the shadiest grocery store I have ever known.

I go through phases with my job. Sometimes it fills me so that I lack the room in my life to feel incomplete. At other times, it makes me feel rounded off. I imagine the smooth curve of an egg when I write that, rolling through a maze. It’s not that the egg cannot get to the end of the maze, but along the way there are many corners and crevices that it can’t fit into, and so it wobbles by them.

Tonight I am the egg, thinking about the (aborted, abused, never-begun) relationships and the unwritten stories lining my particular maze, that I tell myself I haven’t had time for. Though I have literature to comfort me, the buzz of the last Woodchuck out of my fridge, and the Benadryl that is filling my brain with cotton balls and gloriously relieving the itch.

Play the game “Consumer Consequences.”

It would take under under 3, but more than 2 earths in order for everyone on earth(s) to be able to live like me. Probably closer to three in the winter when I pay for heating oil.  The biggest spike in my consumption is in the food and drink category.  I don’t even eat meat!  But I did have to estimate that I drink 21 cups of coffee a week.  And three a day is being conservative

Steven Colbert dance-dance-revolutions with Korean dreamboat, 비!

I was overdue for a haircut. The last had been in early December. So on Saturday morning, I Googled “Philadelphia walk in salon” because this is my problem—I have never planned ahead for a haircut and never gotten one in the city.  Week after week I failed to find time to deal with the question of where to go and never did.  I have a similar problem with my health insurance forms, which I’ve never submitted.

That haircut in December, a treat from my dad when I stopped over at home before going on to Denver, was at the salon my mom always went to—before the chemo. The receptionist recognized my name, and remembered her, though they don’t know why she’d stopped going.

At the pre-4th festivities Mom said it might be time to give them a call again. Which is great, especially if the stylist trims out the parts that she has dyed with sunless tanning liquid. Apparently it’s the only kind of color that will stick in such chemically traumatized locks. I know I’m not in a position to judge, but it comes out very yellow.  I tease her a little, and what I don’t exactly say is “You’re fighting fucking cancer and winning, so why worry about hair?” She, however, will have none of my criticism.

One of the first hits I got was for a salon in Chinatown that reportedly gives head massages with the shampoo. Sold.

The head massage was great. And although my stylist, if she didn’t know how to say what she meant in English would talk to me in Chinese, gave me the best drastically new haircut I have ever gotten.

The last two times I went from relatively long hair to something quite short, I was upset about it for at least 24 hours because either it was necessitated by lice infestation (India), or I had actually only wanted a trim (Korea) and got the life thinned out of it.

And although I only communicated chin-length and that layers were OK, the angled upward, shaved at the back style that she executed is somehow exactly what I wanted.

Today I bought many cleaning liquids at the dollar store. Additionally, a pedicure kit. One of the cleaners came unscrewed in my bag while I was looking at bedsheets at the Valu-Plus, and leaked all over my butt. The woman who was kind enough to give me paper towels from behind the register to clean myself up with, told me how great that cleaner is for getting out stains. Well, good. I then spent the afternoon making couch cushions out of bed pillows and a set of cheap linen curtains with my grandmother’s 30-year-old sewing machine that I have inherited.

Ventured out again in the evening, to Walgreens, feeling snacky. Purchased Breyers sorbet—they donate some of their money to saving bees now, that’s cool—and wondered about the other people who are wandering around a convenience store on a Sunday evening alone. Maybe they don’t have AC either.

Sometimes I skulk around the facebook profiles of my friends who are still in Korea, read their wall messages to each other and feel a little something that I can’t pin down, but the accompanying thought is “Why am I so disconnected, now, completely from what was my life for a year?” And I almost wish that I were someone who wanted to go back.

I interviewed a woman today who did a three and a half year study abroad program; she lived in Thailand and Turkey and other places, and instead of feeling jealous, my first thought upon reading her resume was, “Three and a half years? But how could she do it for so long?”  When two years ago, that would have sounded like the best thing that could possibly happen.

This woman breathed heavily through the entire interview as if she’d been running and never mentioned Turkey.

On Saturday, I stood in the parking lot of the nursing home where my grandmother’s sister lives, in front of the open trunk of my mother’s car, with my dad, guzzling down Sierra Mist to make space in the bottle to add Captain Morgan.  And in the space of the evening, my mom and dad and I drank the entire bottle, which we consumed “under our hats,” out of styrofoam cups, mixed and into the soda we had brought along.

Because there is no alcohol storage allowed in the rooms, a nurse had to bring Aunt Esther a styrofoam cup of bourbon.  She pays for it, but the bottle must be stored in the medicine room and it comes to her the same way that pills do.

It was the Manor’s pre-4th of July lawn party; all of the nursing home residents were given dinner trays of fried chicken and turkey sandwiches—not a single fruit or vegetable—and carted outside. People from the community came and laid out blankets on the lawn.  A big band played, and those who knew how, swinged on the sidewalk.

When, tipsily, my mother, sister, and I went back to Aunt Esther’s room to use her bathroom, we discovered one of her prosthetic legs leaning against the dresser in her bedroom.  It might not have been so eerie had it not been dressed up in hose, a sock, and one of her shoes.

And when, at a quarter of nine, weather.com showed a rainstorm only 20 minutes away, they rushed through the fireworks display, which is the closest I have ever been to fireworks being set off.  All I could do was wonder why people get so much enjoyment out of simulated fire-bombing.

Afterwards, my mother and I walked to the car with Grandma, who stumbled awkwardly up the hill.  “Grandma,” I told her, “You’re still wearing your dark glasses.”  And it poured as soon as we got to the car.

We watched Harry Potter in my parent’s room at the Red Roof Inn, while Dad and his mother dozed off, and then Milie and I went back to our own room.  We pocketed the extra roll of toilet paper since we’re out at home and decadently cranked down the air conditioner.  “I want to sleep under the comforter,” Milie said, and we did.

And we spent the next afternoon back at the Manor, socializing.  The old ladies told stories about everyone in the room from when they were young, which was incredibly boring.

This is what I gave up a life of adventure to be able to do, if my life has ever been an adventure.  I may have seen more wonders of the world and said thank you in more languages than anyone else in the room, but the thing that is hard to explain is how un-adventurous it feels when it’s you. In that case, it’s just your life that you fail to appreciate as often in Korea, India, or China as you might be tempted to in Baltimore, Maryland, spending a weekend with the family.

No, I told myself, I cannot watch Celebrity Circus.  So I put on the local news instead, thinking surely it would be more edifying.  A woman is reviewing tacky glass globes with long tubes that you fill with water and insert in the soil of your home potted plants so that you don’t have to worry about watering them (they’re not really worth it, apparently).

If I were in charge, the local news would be 15 minutes long.  They’d read headlines, do the weather, and run through the sports scores.  They would not put the mother of a kidnapped and recently returned baby on camera to say that she’s learned a lesson—never to let someone else take her baby to the store.  They would not ooh and aww over the story, read aloud, of a local couple about to be married, how they fell in love and came to be engaged.  And they would not “banter.”

I have become a person who watches trash television.  I don’t have any defense, but I also don’t feel that bad about it.

I’m at Melissa’s; we have eaten fish tacos and are watching her cable.  At the beginning of the third date in the second to last episode of A Shot at Love 2 with Tila Tequila, someone shoots off a gun in front of the house across the street. I follow Melissa and Darlene who dash to the front window, and I follow them outside.  The woman across the street keeps her door open, always, I learn, and she’s on the phone with the cops saying that there were young kids, she heard them swearing, they sounded like black kids, and then a gun went off and yeah everybody’s coming out of their houses.

We’re peering up and down the street from the front stoop.

On the one hand I feel chastised because I would have been like the tenants of the two other apartments in this building who did not come down.  I would have thought, well by the time I’ve heard it, I’ve failed to witness the crime.  I hear no cries for help, so what good does it do.  And I would not have had that moment with my neighbor, in which we confirm what has happened in our community and share that we are both concerned.  Agreed when she said “well, they’ve got to find them because somebody could get hurt.” But I also don’t know what we hope to accomplish by looking at a street that is no different now, after the fact, than in the moments just before.  Except to confirm that fact—that there is nothing for us to do.

So we go back inside, watch Brittany’s shot at love come to an end, I finish my Dos Equis and then I venture out into the scary world.  Maybe I should not be so blase about it, but I have always felt that my feelings, that my abstract existential fear, should I feel it, would have no effect on my chances for survival.  And my chances of coming to an untimely end on this night seems unlikely to be any different because of, or in any way related to, some teenagers who discharged a gun across the street from me a half hour before and went off into the night.

There are people out as usual and the only difference in my path home is that I feel inclined to follow a woman in heels that I see walking down Tasker, instead of continuing down deserted 17th.  I’d just passed a man standing at a corner, alone, staring west with one hand fully inside the band of his jockey shorts.

Within a block of home base, I run into my neighbor, whom I’ll call Joseph, for the sake of giving him a name.  I’d passed him earlier on my way back from work. He was walking with two other gentlemen, presumably friends, and wearing a strange, sort of see-through net top, that is especially strange for a man of 50, a father, who has a pacemaker.  He seems now to be coming home from that outing, carrying several laden black plastic bags that the local bodegas hand you your six pack in.

How are you doing, I say and he asks if I want a beer.  I say I’ve had some already and need to go to bed and he says “Are you mad with me?”  No, I tell him, and he insists all he’s gotten from me lately is that—’oh how’s it going?’ I play the work card.  And, I mean, I do spend only three or so of my waking work-week hours really in my house on our street, and I neglect a lot of things.

I did let him in my house once to chat because he knocked on my door and I wanted to be a good neighbor.  I was alone, but I thought, he has a pacemaker, so I can probably take him if he tries anything.  He later apologized because he apparently didn’t remember everything he’d said while he was in my house. I could have reminded him that he told me about being in gangs as a teenager when his mother first bought her house on this street, that he ran with a crowd in which forcible sex was common practice—and thank goodness he never participated—and that the army helped clean him up.  But I didn’t.

So, I have tried be, if not less cordial, then less chummy with the local alcoholic.  Joseph tells me how he’s just met the new guy across the street and walks me to my front steps.  Said new guy has just stepped out to walk his dog, so Joseph officially introduces us. They’re vegans, the couple across the street.  Says so on the back of their white SUV, and is tattooed on the girl’s arm.

Anyway, suffice it to say that I made it inside and to the comfort of my bed, and in time to watch the end of the BBC World News on PBS.  And tomorrow I will take a crack at another day.