The List

It seems unlikely that we were inspired by that Bucket List movie. (Aside: I don't know what the big hairy deal about Jack Nicholson is. Doesn't he always just play himself?) But at about the time it came out, Rachael, Fern, and I began to keep a list of New Things We Want to Try.

Fern started it with a suggestion that we take a spinning class, which brought us to a likable new fitness studio in town with the worst website of all time. Seriously. Don't click that link. And if you do click it, turn off your speakers. I told you it was the worst website of all time. Of course it has music.

Now, I've come a long way in my understanding of the words "spinning class". The problem I had when I realized it was an exercise class (and had nothing to do with wool) is that I heard about it at about the same time everyone was talking about the new form of exercise that uses bump-and-grind stripper moves and a pole. I put the two together and for a long time I thought that "spinning class" meant "pole-dancing exercise class". I was armed with my new-found knowledge that it was really just a stationary bike class when Fern suggested we try it, and so I agreed, because at least it wasn't some sexy dancing thing.

It was on the trip to the fitness studio that Fern and I learned that behind Rachael's placid and friendly exterior, she hides a deep inner core of curmudgeonliness. She only reluctantly agreed to go to the spin class with us, and she maintained throughout that she wasn't going to like it. Up until the class was over, she was the one who kept saying things like, "OK, I'll go, but I'm not going to like spinning." or "Are we really going to go to this spinning thing?" (Spoken with a hopeful lilt to the voice, as if she hoped the answer was no.) The class kicked my ass so badly that I rivaled the sweat production of the overweight man on the bike next to mine. Fern didn't like looking like she was working in front of other people. Surprisingly, Rachael the Reluctant took the ass-kicking as a personal challenge and signed up for more. She has become a regular at the spinning studio, and she has taken all of her aggressive curmudgeonly comments about spinning and turned them towards the studio's website (which deserves every last gripe and which she has to check often because the likable studio doesn't print paper schedules).

And, now, we have all three become a reluctant crew of try-new-thingers. The three of us, introverted, and inclined to stay home because it's easier, slightly cranky about the things we haven't tried, make an odd assortment of adventurers, but we've written a list and we're checking it twice, and we're going to do all sorts of New Things whether we want to or not.

Here are some sample items:

• Take social dance lessons
• Take a cooking class
• Visit a Minnesota winery
• Paddle on the St Croix

So, I'll see you at the social dance studio. But I'm not going to like it.

Fun Bunnies

My college roommate, Kristen, had a family parable about feeling left-out and unloved. It went something like this: Once upon a time, there was a little bunny who wanted to have fun with all of the other little bunnies, but they never invited him to join them, so day after day he sat on the sidelines watching all of their fun and games, and he was very sad and lonely. One day, he asked his mother why the other bunnies never played with him, and she suggested that he make his own fun. He should play his own games and have so much fun by himself that eventually all of the other bunnies would want to see what he was doing so they could be part of his fun.

Another friend (the one with all of the N's) says that I should have a baby by myself. It wouldn't really be by myself, she says, because I have loving and supportive family and friends. And I'm running out of time, and my hunt for dates has been largely unsuccessful anyway. You know the whole boring single-woman-wants-sperm-donor-baby story, because I'm sure you've read all about it in the New York Times magazine.

I caught myself, in mulling over this plan, thinking about that little bunny. The problem with the mother bunny's advice of making fun by yourself is that, when what you really want is companionship, frolicking by yourself just isn't all that much fun. Sure, you can play jump rope alone, and tiddle your winks in solitude, but if all you really want is company, then those other bunnies aren't going to be fooled into thinking that you're having all kinds of enviable fun by yourself. They're going to know it's a trap. And they're going to stay on their side of the playground away from your little bunny games, because you're going to reek of desperation and loneliness.

I'd be a good mom, and sometimes I'd probably have fun doing it even if I were all by myself, but the thing is, it would bring me farther away from what I really want. What I really want is a companion who will hold the rope while I jump and tiddle his winks against mine. (Why do all innocent little children's games have to sound like sex when I write about them?)

Gutter Meat

First let me say, I love my neighborhood. It's a place where young families and old people live side-by-side in stucco bungalows. It has a nice mix of ethnicities and sexual preferences. Most lawns are are littered with liberal lawn signs, and you actually see people out strolling the streets most seasons of the year. In fact, the other day, I was walking through the park, and I realized that you can tell what season it is by what sports the kids are playing. Right now, for example, it's baseball season, but the basketball hoop is still seeing a lot of action, too.

So, what's the drawback? Well, in a neighborhood where people care about their lawns and keep up with their perennials, I am shocked again and again by how much meat and bones are strewn about in their boulevards. I wouldn't even notice, if I didn't have Buddy, but I do have Buddy, and, seriously, neighbors, why wouldn't you take those rib bones to the trash? What possesses you to throw a chicken bone down next to your tree? Why would you so carelessly toss aside that hamburger and leave it in the gutter?

It's confusing. Is there really this much meat detritus all over my fair city or is my neighborhood just full of extraordinarily careless carnivores? At any rate, it slows down our walks and contributes to Buddy's ongoing digestive dramas. I mean, we can't expect him to walk on by that pile of delicious fast food wrappers without sampling the leftovers (and digging into the paper itself), can we? Somehow I think I'll have better luck convincing my neighbors to clean up after their protein feasts.

The Luxury of a Crush

Having met my last several dates online, and having jumped from one unsuccessful month-long relationship to another since March of 2006, I now find myself in a situation I haven't felt in years. I have a crush on someone I sort-of know.

In the online dating world, the transition from strangers to lovers is so brief (if it is going to happen at all, which it usually doesn't) that you scarcely have time for that stomach-churning internal dialogue. You know the one. It goes like this: "I like him. I want to talk to him. What can I say? Oh my god, did he just flirt with me? Now what can I say back that's witty enough that he might think I'm possibly interested, but not so blatant he thinks I'm a crazy psycho-stalker?" For me, because I'm such a socially awkward introvert, this internal dialogue sometimes seems so loud that I accompany it with a complete removal of eye-contact and banter with the object of my affections. If he were interested, surely, he would have noticed that I was completely ignoring him, and, therefore, going insane inside. Now why did he stop talking to me? Damn.

Anyway, back in college, I had such an abundance of these crushes, that I had to give them nicknames to keep them all straight. Bike boy, who had a bright yellow bike and deep dark eyes. The Package, who just seemed like all around perfection to me. Dirty Dancer because I once bumped and grinded with him to Madonna at a party (and then proceeded to avoid him like the plague ever after. Good technique. And we wonder why I'm still single.). Little did I know, at the time, that this plethora of options was temporary, that as I aged, there would be fewer and fewer opportunities for me to fantasize about conversations I'm too timid to actually have. So that now in my thirties, I can just call my crush just The Crush, because there is only one and the next one might be years away.

And he's probably married anyway - although I did boldly glance at his left hand the other day and found no ring. It took me three months of Saturdays to get that far. Maybe by summer I'll ask him about it.

Are Our Projects Graded, Yet?

So, the thing I most procrastinate about, the thing I hate doing the most, even more than dishes, is grading a certain project that inertia demands I keep assigning in one of my classes. There's only so much I can read about Halo or the history of Nintendo before I want to tear my hair out by the roots. There are only so many barely-reworded wikipedia plagiarizisms that I care to see before my eyes glaze over and I wonder what it was like back in the good ol' days when students used to steal words from actual well-written encyclopedias.

Here's a tip for my teenage readers: if you're fourteen, it's nearly impossible that you will naturally use constructions like "mark the turnaround of his career" or "not only, but rather". If you type such words into a paper, and your teacher hasn't been lulled into a moronic puddle of drool by the mind-numbingly dull words of your classmates, you will be caught. So stop copying. Besides, you may not believe this because you're fourteen, but you actually do have some unique things to say. I once had a kid describe how to balance on a unicycle. It wasn't Shakespeare (or even Wikipedia), but it was good, detailed writing and I'd never read anything like it before. Why can't you try that? Explain something you know. I'm not looking for Proust. It doesn't matter that you don't know who Proust is. I just want you to create something of your own, so when you look back at it years later, you see only your own work. OK?

Anyway, I have nine left to grade. Nine out of thirty. Which reduces to three out of ten. Only 30% left to grade. I could have begun to grade one of them in the time it took me to calculate that percent, but I didn't. Nope.

The kids - who say the darndest things - said, "Why aren't they graded, yet? Did you have some personal turmoil in your life?" Yes. I confessed. I did. Turmoil they are too young to imagine.

"You procrastinated, didn't you?" they said. Yes. I confessed. I did.

"It's OK, we understand about procrastinating," they said, and I felt like the World's Worst Teacher for leading them by example towards an entire lifetime of wishing you had only done your work when you were supposed to, so you would never again have to look at a class full of innocent children and tell them that you still hadn't graded their endless stack of dull, plagiarized projects.

Nine more to go. Seventy percent complete. That's a C-. Isn't that good enough? Can I stop now?

In the Belly of the Beast Looking for Coffee

If you're me, and you get nervous around pushy strangers, you spend your whole life avoiding Mormons. You learn to recognize them from the earnest way they wear their Jansport backpacks securely fastened over both shoulders, the straps somehow barely wrinkling their freshly pressed white dress shirts, and their ties swinging between their arms as they bike through the Philips neighborhood looking for converts. They travel in pairs, being all freshly scrubbed - the whitest, youngest, most earnest men in the neighborhood. And I, uncomfortable around all that cleanliness and conviction, cross the street when I see them, avoiding both their intense eye-contact and their pamphlets.

And so it's all kinds of odd to find myself in Salt Lake City, the whole town scrubbed clean, the streets wide and orderly, the lights gently whistling at me when it's safe to cross the street, a subtle reminder painted in the street at my feet, telling me to look both ways. There are even bright orange flags in cups at crosswalks, so you can carry them with you when you step into traffic, and leave them on the other side when you make it safely across. It makes me worry even more about those fresh-scrubbed biker Mormans in Philips. Minneapolis must seem like the Most Dangerous Place on Earth to someone used to a town built to protect you from traffic and from the whole wide world.

Anyway, I'm here, and I'm me, so I need coffee and the Internet. All of this orderliness makes me long for the chaos of the World Wide Web. It would drive me to porn if I were the type. It's not the easiest task in the world to find a coffee shop among all of these clean-living people, and my first route took me to a plaza owned by the Mormon church. So there I was, after spending my whole life avoiding the Mormons, walking right onto their sacred ground. Would I have to stare at my feet the whole time in order to avoid being converted? No, it turns out, because, at least on Saturday morning at 9:00, the place is deserted, quiet, like a museum. I see one man in a tie and jacket, and because I am in his land, I make a point of smiling at him and meeting his eyes. I figure as I do so, that really, the safest place on Earth from an attempted Mormon-conversion might be here, at their very doorstep. As far as he knows, I am already saved. There's something freeing about it. Here, at least, I don't have to avoid those poor clean boys and their convictions.

And, besides, after I passed safely out of the Mormon sanctuary I found myself on a street (wide and very well-regulated) that looked promising for what I really needed - coffee and at least the knowledge that there is always something unseemly and unsafe just a click away.

Stories that Interrupt Themselves

You know how it is, when you meet someone you kind of like and you can't stop smiling, and if he likes you back, he smiles, too, and then it's an endless cycle of slightly goofy grins?

You know how it is when you're getting to know someone you kind of like, and both of your words tumble over each other in endless stories that interrupt themselves and swerve and veer and become new stories, until you've created whole volumes of things you know about each other, but you're never quite sure if you ever did finish that story from before - the one you started that reminded you of spiders, which of course meant you had to tell the story about the spider in the ear, because anything to do with spiders or ears elicits that story when you're in the right mood.

It's like porn. You can't quite define it, but you'll know it when you see it.

And then, like a hard cold lump of concrete that helps you weigh-down the abstract, you go on a date with someone who isn't like that, someone who doesn't smile at you, someone so reserved you can't sweet-talk him into a single story, someone who would stop talking all together if you so much as tried to interrupt him, even for the spider-in-the-ear story, which is delightful in its own creepy way. And then you remember. That's what it's like. It's like everything that this date isn't. That's when you can be secretly proud of yourself for not trying to make one of these somber, intelligent, but deathly dull dates work, even though you just were berating yourself for being too picky. You weren't too picky. You were just the right amount of picky. Wait for it. Please, just wait. It's worth it.

Take Two of These and Call Me in the Morning

So, for the past two Fridays, I've come home from school completely worn to the bone (which I'm sure you noticed from the previous post). And then precisely at 8:00, after a short introduction from Gillian Anderson, I get to immerse myself in Jane Austen for almost two hours, and I even get the luxury of not thinking about students who failed their finals because they are too blocked to learn math. Better still, I get to do so with a group of people who feed me and make me laugh and can imagine themselves learning English country dancing - and even invite me to join them in taking lessons.

These Jane Austen parties, it turns out, are my ideal tonic to a week gone wrong. Who could be crabby while eating homemade empanadas, and falling for Henry Tilney's flirtatious looks and dancing banter? How can I be sad when Selena hasn't even seen Pride and Prejudice yet, and I get to be there when she does? What can be bad about conversations that meander past using our "geek voices" to downplay our intelligence, and end with reminiscences about Ladyhawke and olde English spellings? Somehow I've bought more than a few hours more of weekend by spending a few hours with this kind of laughter and fellowship. It's even worth being up way past 10:00 to do so.

The Cycle

There's a teaching graph. The first time I saw it it was called "First Year of Teaching" or something similar. Later, I saw it with a more generic label, which meant that I'd have to suffer through it year after year, and not just that first year. It's a graph of happiness vs. time.

The happiness is pretty high in September, when you're optimistic and hopeful and you have all sorts of great ideas. I, myself, am a wonderful teacher during that week before school starts. I always call parents when I should and I know exactly what to do with all of the behavior problems (at least until the kids show up). The happiness starts to dip a bit in November, as the daily grind catches up to you, you miss a few warning calls home and the behavior escalates, as papers pile up on your desk and you stop getting eight hours of sleep at night.

It continues to slide downward until it hits a very deep trough in January and February. I think it was labeled "despair" on the graph I saw. My principal calls is the "Bataan Death March". This is where I am right now. In the trough of despair, marching with my eyes barely open. And Rachael asked me why I wasn't posting...

Do you really want to hear about how there are 3 to 5 kids who won't pass each of my classes and I can tell you exactly how far each of them are from that magical 59.5%? Do you want me to tell you how I haven't called all of their moms recently to tell them that they won't pass? Should I regale you with the rage I feel when I hear words that sound so innocent in September: "Can I borrow a pencil?"

I go through a pack of pencils a day. It makes me insane. I wonder how I can "lend" the same kid a pencil day after day, and he still comes to class the next day without one. It's not like the little twerp gave it back to me. It makes me even more insane to watch him sit there watching his education pass him by because he can't write ("I forgot my pencil and she wouldn't lend me one, so I'm just going to turn into a piece of wood until the bell rings.").

Should I tell you about how I spent the day cleaning up the messes left behind when kids were jerks to the substitute? Do you want to hear about iPods in class, or would you rather hear about how freaking obvious it is when kids text their friends with their phones in their pockets?

So, this graph thing? It goes up in March or April. It's happened to me four times, now. I know it will happen again. It just doesn't seem quite possible, but that's the magic of the school calendar. Too bad this Death March happens right when the temperature outside makes me want to curl up into a little ball anyway, but I'm not so sure that's a coincidence, either.

Buddy hates it, too. That's why he's secretly planning his next Bad Thing.

Secure the Home

And so I thought, "That Buddy, he sure does suck, but at least he's already done all of the bad things he ever does this week, so he can't possibly do anything else." Then I went to a knitting meetup where I knit with a bunch of strangers in a coffee shop. While I was gone, he ripped the entire baby gate off the wall. He didn't just bust it open at the hinges, like he usually does, because I had bungie corded it shut. No, he had to pull the whole thing down.

Here's the current state of the dog food security, if you're keeping score:
The food is in a bag.
The bag is inside of a metal trash can.
The metal trash can is inside of a closed cabinet.
The cabinet is dead-bolted.
The cabinet is inside of a closet.
The closet door is tightly closed.
The closet is in the kitchen.
The kitchen was protected by a baby gate.
(And the green grass grows all around, all around.)

Today Buddy destroyed the gate. When he masters doorknobs and deadbolts, he takes over the world and we're all screwed.

And, even just writing these words has ensured that no one, ever, will dog-sit again. I guess it's true what they say: you have to be careful what you put on the Internet.

Crap! Oh! Crap!

It's hard to believe that only this week I was telling everyone to get a dog. I take it all back. You don't need a dog. Fish are the new dogs. You need fish. Dogs are nothing but trouble.

The last three days have been hard ones to own Buddy. He broke through my latest fencing technology (a clothes hanger bent to hold shut the back gate) on Saturday, and ran free in the neighborhood for an hour, until he finally got tired and let me capture him again, minutes before I had to depart the house for a yoga class.

Last night I went to the co-op for a long-overdue shopping trip, because I had no human food in the house. I was gone for less than an hour. During that time, Buddy broke through the baby gate into the kitchen, somehow managed to open the closet door, made a mess of my garbage, and ate half a bag of dog food. I got home and his midsection was all swelled up like a balloon. One thing is predictable about Buddy and that is that when he eats half a bag of dog food, it usually comes out the stinky end. I took him on extra long walks last night and this morning, knowing that it wasn't enough. But what can you do? I have to work, and I had to attend an after school meeting, and I had to wait around afterwards for a student who promised to come in for help (and who didn't), so by the time I got home, at 5:20, it was too late. Buddy had lost his shit. Literally. On my floor.

I'm dog-sitting for a standard poodle, so my only thought was that I had to get the two giant dogs out of the house long enough that I could clean up after Buddy and make that awful stink go away, so I let the dogs loose in the yard, only remembering ten minutes later as I bagged up paper towels full of crap and mopped and re-mopped the floor, that Buddy had mastered my back gate. Too late. He was free in the neighborhood again. It was another hour before I managed to get him home.

So, tired, frustrated, and angry, and still smelling the stink, I let him into my house. He looked at me with sad brown eyes, "Aren't you going to feed me?" Yeah. Right. You'll be lucky if you ever eat again, Buddy.

How to Live Alone

1. Realize first of all, that television is a crutch. Sometimes, your legs hurt, and you need a crutch, but most of the time, you can walk without one. Believe that you will dream of something to do if you turn off the TV, and, somehow, you will. One exception to this rule is when you're on a knitting kick, and then only if you knit a lot of rows while you watch. It is, of course, also OK to watch the complete Jane Austen which debuts on channel 2 on January 13.
2. Be aware at all times that the complete Jane Austen is only pretend. The real Jane Austen died alone, leaving behind only her pack of beautiful lies. It's OK to pretend that you are Elizabeth Bennett, but don't get carried away and pretend that Mr. Darcy exists and is about to rescue you from solitude. The key here is to embrace solitude. How can you do that, if you're forever expecting some dude to say, "Almost from the earliest moments of our acquaintance, I have come to feel for you a passionate admiration and regard."? Modern dudes won't say that. They'd totally get laid if they did, but they still won't. I may never understand men.
3. Get a dog, for God's sake. I don't know how you've lasted this long without one. He'll force you to get up in the morning. He'll sleep with you when no one else will. He'll watch your every move, and keep you from spending the day in your pajamas. You definitely need a dog.
   
4. Don't get cats. You shouldn't have to live with a litter box. What's the point of living alone if you have to scrape litter off the bottoms of your feet after you get out of the shower? Seriously. You'd rather have roommates than cats.
   
5. It's not really that hard to cook for one. In fact, whenever you make a meal, you are really making a week's worth of food. You are lucky this way. No one will eat up all of your leftovers and leave you without a lunch. You'll be eating the same food for a week, though, so you'd better make it good.
   
6. Go to the movies. Go out to eat. Attend political rallies. Do it alone. It's OK. No one is looking at you and feeling sorry for you. They feel more sorry for you when you sit at home alone, anyway. Go. Be. Do.
   

Wiiiiiiiii

Well, it's been a long time since my last video game addiction. I was into the Sims for a couple of months about three years ago, and I'd spend so much time feeding my little guy and sending him to the bathroom and getting him a job that I ran a risk in real life of starving to death and/or wetting my pants. Playing the Sims had all of the appeal of playing with my doll house when I was 7. I got to build a house and add onto it and buy furniture. I named all of my Sims after NPR personalities, so I got to be the hand of God that caused Nina Totenberg and Corey Flintoff to fall in love and start a family (until Nina started her little fling with Carl Kasell). Anyway, eventually, I realized that I was hungry and I had to pee, so I let the Sims gather virtual dust inside of my computer, and Nina and Corey and Carl returned to their original roles in my life as voices on the radio.

The Sims was one of those games that was designed to appeal to women, because the male video game market was already tapped, but women weren't playing. It worked (at least for me), because the Sims was all about relationships, and the slow building of a life. You begin with a little bit of money and a simple house, and you have to work from the ground up, gradually adding rooms, upgrading your stove and getting promoted at your job. You flirt slowly with the Sim next door, talking about sports and birds until eventually your thoughts turn to love, and then you get to work on living happily ever after by expanding the house and having babies. In the Sims world, though, I was always more into the house addition than the new family members, because the babies just meant more mouths to feed and trips to the bathroom.

So, it's no coincidence that my new video game addiction is also made for women and families. The Nintendo Wii, is actually about the relationships of the real people holding the controllers, though. You get to jump around and be silly with your friends and family, flailing wildly and ducking and weaving as your virtual selves box it out on the screen. You can team up and play tennis together, feeling like a well-oiled machine with your friend (or like a machine that has a couple of missing cogs as the case may be). You also get to slowly build up your skill points, which feels a little like being a Sim and finding your way in the world. And, of course, I can spend twenty minutes creating a "Mii" who looks just like me (sort of, almost, a little bit), which appeals to the doll house lover in me.

I'm just glad that I don't have to feed the Mii or take her to the bathroom, and, just to be safe, I'm not going to let her flirt with any other Miis. I don't know how effective Mii birth control is, but I do know a thing or two about abstinence, damn it.

Jinxing It

So you get all dressed up, and you spend more time than you'd like to admit wondering if it's OK that there's a gap between the bottom edge of your skirt and the top of your very first pair of sexy-ish black boots (with sensible heels) and, if it is OK, should your tights be black or gray? You wear a little bit of make-up because you hear that that's what the real girls are doing these days, but then you get nervous in the car and probably chew it all off your lips, and you have dinner with a guy who looks a little bit like your older brother (who's a good-looking guy, but it's still distracting, because, ick, incest), and then you wind up having a Geek Off right there at the dinner table, and you talk about sci fi and perfect numbers, and you kind of wish you'd shut up, but even more, you kind of wish he'd like this about you, more than the chewed-off lipstick and the skirt, because who knows when you'll be wearing those things again, but the geek? That's forever, baby.

How to Make an American Pick up Litter

So this morning, as I was walking Buddy through the winter wonderland that Minnesota has become since yesterday, I saw a plastic Ziploc bag lying in the road at 38th street. I probably would have let it stay there, except when I glanced at it I realized that there was cash inside. Turns out that it was only $42, but it was rolled up in such a way that it looked like much more, and, so, OK, I wouldn't have picked up this baggie if it didn't look like it was loaded with cash. Sorry. Call me greedy. It's not like I was going to take the money for my own.

And so I detoured slightly at the sight of the greenbacks, and I picked it up, and I discovered that it not only contained cash, but bank account numbers written in an old person's handwriting, keys, a cell phone, a wallet, credit cards, a social security card, a drivers license, and a phone bill. I looked around for hidden cameras. This was obviously a test. It was probably some sort of "Which City is more Honest?" thing for some weekly news magazine. I didn't see any cameras, but I was starting to worry about the owner of this property, so I walked Buddy back home (which he thought was a Very Bad Idea since we hadn't even gone a block yet, and he really had to crap out that entire loaf of freshly baked French bread he allegedly stole off of the counter at Christmas yesterday) and I started my investigations. Now, you don't have to be Veronica Mars (or even Nancy Drew) to figure out someone's phone number from a Qwest phone bill account number, so I dialed the number, but a fax machine answered.

As I listened to the high-pitched language of data transfers, I glanced through the rest of the bag. There was a number and the mystery guy's name written on the outside of the bag, so I figured he was probably a newly-released prisoner, and these were all of his possessions when he entered the joint. I even imagined his buddy picking him up in a cab from prison, them arguing in the back seat (about his refusal to reveal the location of the bounty from their most recent crime spree), and then the inevitable pummeling, followed by his no-longer buddy tossing all of his worldly possessions out the window, before dumping his body somewhere far away. Of course, this explanation falls apart with the existence of the $42. No way some hardened criminal is just going to throw $42 out the window. Still, this scenario kind of made me glad I was trying to communicate with a fax machine rather than a real person.

It didn't really fit with the guy's handwriting though. His account numbers, written on the back of an address book which had turned yellow on the edges with age, were written in the handwriting of a frail and shaky old man. The first names in the address book, too, were not the first names of the friends of criminals. They were names like "Bev" and "Arlene" and "Roger". Old names.

Then I pulled out a yellow slip of paper. It was an inventory of the contents of my mystery baggie right down to a list of the bills that made up the $42, and it was from the Hennepin County Medical examiner. This was a dead guy. I was looking at everything this man was carrying right until he died three days before Christmas. Poor George. Somehow him being dead made me want to protect him even more than him being a living person ripe for identity theft. And so I walked and fed Buddy, because he wasn't going to wait for any mystery. And now I'm off to the police station (another long and snowy walk for some lucky dog) where I will put poor George's belongings in the hands of professionals, so they can contact Bev or Arlene or Roger and take care of his things properly.


PS For those of you still wondering about the resolution to that other mystery "The Case of the Missing French Bread", Buddy's intestines added to the circumstantial evidence that he was the culprit. I'm his biggest fan and his most ardent supporter, but I knew he was the guilty party all along.

Secret Optimism

Despite being a rather depressive and pessimistic person (especially at this time of year), I do have a secret deep-seated belief that there are many men with whom I could happily spend the rest of my life. I also believe that if I keep looking, I'm bound to find one of them. Sometimes, I think that I've already let some of them go in my youth and my ignorance. But since I'm not a believer in the One True Love theory, it doesn't always make me despair knowing that those good men are long gone.

On the other hand I'm starting to think that none of my true loves dates online. Oh, well. I'll go back to joining stuff. Maybe I'll volunteer for some Democrat. I'm pretty sure all of my true loves are Democrats. I'll also continue to beg my friends for blind dates. Somehow I think this will work better than joining the lonely hearts online. Although, I must say, married people don't seem to take their responsibility of setting up their single friends very seriously at all. Come on, people. Be a pal. It's no skin off your noses.

And now I've become distracted by the word "deep-seated". I initially wrote it as deep-seeded, but, since Google is so easy I looked it up. It's "seated". Wouldn't it be better if it were the other way? It's firmly planted, right? So seeds. Plants. Get it? Oh, well. Stupid English never makes sense, anyway. That's why we should all do math all the time.

My Musical Ear

I spent last night at the St Paul Chamber Orchestra listening to the Brandenburg Concertos. If you are one of the people who actually knows me, I know what you're thinking. It goes something like this: "What? You? Music?" I have a little problem with music. I can't hear it. For a long time, I thought I was tone deaf, but my 8th grade band teacher informed me that I was good at tuning my trombone (and finding the notes along the slide), so my problem is deeper than mere tone-deafness. No, I actually think I'm tune deaf. I can't piece together the individual notes in my brain and form a melody. I should say that I have a really, really hard time piecing together the notes, because I hate it when people say they "can't" do math, and, besides, I do know three or four tunes. I know the way "Take me Out to the Ballgame" sounds (and even Jimmy says that I mostly sing it on key). I can also sing "The Wheels on the Bus", which is an old preschool trick. I believe in singing to kids, but with my disability I didn't master every song, so I just made up new lyrics to one song. I'm not so good at "Happy Birthday" even though I've heard it at least 34 times, so I lip-sync that one. I do have the melody to a couple of Beatles songs stuck in my brain.

Mostly what I do when music is playing is I tune it out. My brain gets tired of trying to make sense of the tune, so I think about something else. Sometimes the something-else is the lyrics. I sometimes turn on country music, for example, when MPR is running a pledge drive, because I enjoy the stories in the lyrics, but I couldn't sing you the tune of a single country music song.

Once when I was relatively old, I was stuck in a record store with my dad (who loves music), and I was bored so I wandered around looking at things. I discovered a section of the store called "Movie Soundtracks", which is when I found out that all movies - not just musicals - have music in them. I flipped through the records marveling at this whole new world I'd never noticed before. "Bull Durham" had music? What? I never knew.

Anyway, when my old and dear friend T invited me to listen to chamber music with her, I was flattered and interested enough that I thought I would try it out. Maybe in person, with the instruments right there in front of me, I could pay attention to the music. Classical music, however, is the very hardest for me, because there are no lyrics to focus my attention.

The first song (concerto? musical piece?) caught my attention for a little while because it sounded like men and women arguing. The men were the baseline with slow, steady, repetitive, and well-reasoned arguments. The women were the violins arguing with passion and volume and eloquence. By the end of the song (movement?), both voices spoke with triumphant joy at winning the argument. The men knew that they couldn't have lost with such reasonable and steady arguments, and the women were just as certain that their verbal acumen had once again carried the day. I was proud of myself. I had found a way to focus on the music. I couldn't possibly hum one strain of what I had just heard, but even without lyrics I had a whole story figured out in my head.

Then T turned to me and said, "It's so festive, you can just imagine a room full of people in ball-gowns dancing, can't you?" So I smiled and agreed, because my argument theory was obviously the wrong way to hear the music. Still, it sort of worked, so I tried it with the next piece. I can't say I was always successful at making up stories to keep my mind from wandering back to school or the taste of my dinner still lingering in my mouth or my cracked and bleeding hands, but I can say that I stayed awake for the entire concert. Which is saying something since it went way past my bedtime.

What I Want

What I really want right now is a connection. I want to stay up late into the night talking, because we can't think of anything not to say. I want to wake up the next day too tired to function, but blissful and somehow energized, because I can't wait to say the 24 more things I've thought of to say the next night. I want to feel excited for the phone to ring. I want to be sure about someone. I want to feel beautiful and smart and exciting, and I want to be able to make him feel that way, too. I'd love to come home to a meal cooked for me on some ordinary Tuesday. I want someone I can call when some lame very-special Christmas episode of "Bones" makes me tear up, so the tears can turn to laughter and snot, instead of moroseness and despair. I want a travel companion who knows how to take off on his own sometimes. Someone who could read books on the couch next to me while I grade papers. A warm place to put my feet at night. I want him to kick my butt into graduate school already. I want someone to plan with me. I want him to crack inappropriately surprising jokes that keep me from ever really anticipating his sense of humor. And if it's not too much to ask, on top of all of this, can he be tall and lanky, too, please, so that I feel like touching him? Often.

Have I squandered another perfectly good lifetime listening to Car Talk, or can I feel this way one more time again before I start knitting tea cozies and adopting stray cats, while I peek around my curtain and call the city about neighbors who don't shovel their walks properly?

Feud

Two side-by-side houses in my neighborhood each shoveled themselves out of the snowstorm this week. Inexplicably, neither one of them shoveled a foot-and-a-half wide swatch of sidewalk somewhere between the two houses, leaving a patch of untouched snow between two well-cleared areas. I can only come to one conclusion: They are in the midst of a terrible feud, possibly involving sex, drugs, or a disagreement about a fence. This is very exciting. I will have to keep an eye on the no-man's-land between these two houses. Will the disputed territory extend to mowing as well? Will one of them crack and take the extra half a minute it would take to clear that last scoop of snow or will it continue to pile up threatening death and destruction to old ladies, until the city is forced to consult its maps to determine the exact property line between the two houses? What could have been so terrible that the second shoveler stopped before he reached that stripe of snow? I may have to set up surveillance. Or maybe, just maybe, I've seen too many episodes of Veronica Mars this winter.

Ambigasity

Fern and I coined a new term. I, of course, forgot all about it, until she reminded me last night. It was in response to a certain situation at a wedding last month. The wedding had square dancing instead of the traditional awkward couple-swaying so common at most weddings these days. Square dancing increased participation because the caller would tell you exactly what to do, and, even if you didn't have your own partner at the wedding, asking someone to square dance is a non-sexual advance, so it was relatively easy to participate as a single person.

At any rate, we each separately noticed a very particular unpleasant smell emanating from the crowd of people dancing. Because so many people kept swapping partners, it turned out to be nearly impossible to identify the exact source of this odor, but as the night progressed both Fern and I put forth several private theories, most of which didn't hold up to the long night of dancing. We also each worried that we were the objects of other people's hypotheses since we realized that we were just two more faces in the crowd of possible suspects. Eventually, since the smell continued no matter who was on the dance floor, I was left with just three surviving suspects.

First, I had to suspect the caller. He was the only common denominator whenever I was dancing (other than myself, and I ruled myself out because I'd know if it were me). He was also a logical suspect, the sort of crunchy granola, older dude who wouldn't hold in his farts if he had to cut one.

Second, since the dance floor wasn't far from the bathrooms, it could have been a plumbing, rather than a gastric problem. The women's bathroom seemed fine from my two visits there, but who knew about the men's? It could have been the source of a lot of unpleasantness.

And finally, I suspected the dinner. It had squash and pheasant in it, both of which could have been an unfamiliar irritant to several different stomachs on the dance floor. Maybe there wasn't a single perpetrator of the stank, but several emitters of silent but deadly gases. This "grassy knoll" hypothesis seemed at least as likely as the caller, and slightly more likely than the men's bathroom (because, really, wouldn't one of the men have mentioned it?).

At any rate, it was a rather unsatisfying mystery, because it remains unsolved to this day. I didn't even realize anyone else had noticed it, until during the car ride home, Fern abruptly announced that we needed a word to describe the lingering, but unidentified, fart smell on the dance floor. "Ambigasity" won the short debate. We don't have an answer, but at least we have a word.