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.

I had three phone interviews to do at the end of the day today, which made it hard to get out of the office in time for the Trocodero’s movie Monday (featuring The Goonies). Which is kind of a funny phenomenon—a roomful of adults with buckets of beer watching movies that they, for the most part, already love and have seen many times.  Having that living room with your buddies experience, but in a theatre, where it’s ok to quote the movie and give Chunk a round of applause.

And that last interviewee, when I asked what book he recommended that I read, recommended what is probably my least favorite book in the English language.  Oh, man. Intruder in the Dust by William Faulkner.  I was in the tenth grade when I read it and I just remember that the six page long sentence struck me as an criminal abuse of language.  Grammar is a gift, goddammit, I don’t care who you are.

After watching it again in adulthood, I have a newfound appreciation for The Goonies. And the fact that much smarter movies were once made and marketed to children.  What happened?

I left with the urge to listen to that Sarah Mclachlan song—”Your Love is Better than Ice Cream.”  Probably because it is so hot.

As I walked to the subway, paramedics were pulling a prone human form off of the platform of a statue of Ben Franklin, and wrapping it in a white sheet.  City Hall after dark is strange kind of place.  Still and dotted with the quiet human shadows of homeless people.

On the steps leading out of my subway stop, it looked like someone had broken an entire box of soft white light bulbs.

I started pulling clothes off as soon as I got to the top of my stairs and jumped in the shower with only the cold nozzle on, which has made the remainder of the night…only barely tolerable.  I am not ready for summer.

I had to move to the downstairs couch to finish sleeping this morning.  7:45am and already in the 80s.  Had really cracked out dreams that involved iced coffee, thunderstorms, and trying to run, which is always comical because, no matter the dream, when I run it’s like I’m trying to move through waist-high water.  I can’t pick up speed and cannot make turns.

I have an indoor/outdoor thermometer in my kitchen that I purchased at the beginning of the winter to make sure that I suffered enough to keep my heating oil bill manageable.  It tends to exaggerate the temperature in the morning because the sun falls directly on the back of the house where the sensor is attached.  So while it is 87 degrees in the kitchen, that’s actually a bit of a relief because it currently reads between 104 and 106 outside depending on cloud cover.

I’m reading about how 27 percent of the food available for consumption in the United States ends up in a landfill and I vow on the spot to start a vermicompost bin on my back porch. Because I’ve got funky jars of roasted red peppers, frozen edamame from last summer, and expired vegan mayonnaise just hanging out in my fridge so that I can pretend they haven’t been wasted yet.

And I felt so self-satisfied this afternoon when I turned 5 pieces of stale bread into breadcrumbs and baked them into lentil loaf. If that only put a dent in the situation. There is a bag of pita that will go the same way later this week and become the gratin in asparagus au gratin, which I have to make because I bought two bunches for $1 each in the market today, but only because the vegetable hawker muttered under his breath about how the rain was keeping customers away and I felt bad.

I’m still thinking about what my life as a person who owns a box of worms would be like and all I can think about is the next time I move. “Yes, person who loves me enough to help carry my shit from one place to another, I’m asking you to move a heavy box of decomposing broccoli stalks, coffee grounds, and coupon flyers, and a back yard built of adjacent potted plants and flower boxes.” Which would be the insult on top of the injury that is my book collection.

I’ve never wanted to start a vegetable garden for the sake of eating home-grown vegetables, but it suddenly seems like a good way to assuage my guilt over being a wasteful person. And instead of having cats, become a crazy potted plant lady. With really tall, well-fertilized potted plants.

The black cowboy riding into the sunset:

I’m reading this article about this history of Bisphenol-A, its use in plastics, and its finally being identified as harmful to humans at doses that we are probably routinely exposed to when, say, microwaving leftovers in a Tupperware container.

What we’re now learning are developmental toxins have been an integral part of the celebrated progress of the 20th century.  Plastics made it possible!  Innovation!  Convenience!  The space shuttle!  Abnormal prostate growth!

My exposure to BPA and the rest of them is at once something over which I have little control–for the better part of my life we had no idea this shit was bad, and anyway I was a child who didn’t make my own choices about what containers my food was put into and came out of.  And now that I do know, it makes me want to convert entirely to storing leftovers in used glass spaghetti jars and throw out, I mean recycle, all my plastic containers because I don’t fucking want cancer.

My grandmother had nonmalignant, estrogen-related tumors removed when I was in elementary school.  She was, what, in her early seventies? and it ended up not being a big deal.  I.e. the surgery went well and she’s not suffered ill effect since then.  And then my mother developed the same tumors, ten years later, but she was twenty years younger, and seven years after that they came back as cancer.

It could be genetics, but it could also be shared environment.  The toxic chemicals in pesticides and consumer products, the residual hormones in factory-farmed meat, are developments of the last fifty years, so wouldn’t you expect exposure to have increased and for the effects to be more pronounced in each younger generation?  Fuck me.

So I’m left wondering if there’s the slimmest chance that by spending more money on organic milk, I might save on hospital bills and hardship later.  Or if there’s nothing I can do because anyway I’ve already been exposed, and besides, what else don’t we know is harmful yet?

It’s a problem that there’s no such thing as scientific regress.  Every new development or technology is called progress, when the idea of progress is actually a value judgment, not an objective truth.  Being able to do more becomes synonymous with doing better, and absolves us from evaluating the actual improvement of our lives as a result.  I shouldn’t lay it all on science.  Business is what’s capitalized on this fact, and marketed it and tried to avoid anyone discovering that the things making our modern lives possible and profitable are also killing us.

Accepting that medical catheters and computers and lightweight prosthetic limbs have improved the lives of those of us fortunate enough to have access, really, though, is the Swiffer progress over the mop?  Are plastic sandwich bags progress over the days of tin lunch boxes?  And isn’t if fucked up that if we answer yes, in means that disposability is synonymous with improvement?