Mail Call

This arrived in the mail today. I'm not sure I'm supposed to be reading this, since he stresses three times that the postcard is addressed to him.

However, one way or another, this affirms that my boyfriend is a poet (and that he may or may not remember what my name is).

What is IN this container?!?!

So... one person cleaning a refrigerator is a lot less "fun" than two people cleaning a refrigerator. When Tim and I clean the fridge together, there's a lot of incredulous laughter as things are thrown into a huge trash bag and forgotten about forever. The burden of identifying, then scrapping, then cleaning... all of that is shared and somehow way less terrifying.

Buuuuut when I cleaned the fridge by myself today, in an effort to preempt the scramble will inevitably take place in the few days between finals and Panama... it went a little more like this:

I mostly spent thirty minutes frantically jamming foul-smelling food that I should have eaten weeks ago down the disposal while shouting, "I'M SORRY, JESUS! I'M SORRY, JESUS" and trying to jump out of the way while it splattered all over the sink, then gingerly cramming glade containers into the dish-washer while trying not to touch or smell them. (Yes, it is possible to "gingerly cram" something.)

So. I guess you can add that to the list of things I don't like doing by myself. Also, the only things I have in the fridge now are pretty much BBQ sauce (Tim's) and chocolate soy milk (I ate all the vegetables). I'm sorry, Jesus.

Stuck in the middle with... me.

I'm supposed to be doing homework right now. Or sleeping.

Those are pretty much my two allowable activities until the 13th of May.

But I feel like something has to be said about how completely odd it is to be living completely alone for the first time in my life, ever. Yes--this is just temporary, I'm completely surrounded by Tim's stuff, and someone is sharing all the bills, but it's very weird to be stocking a refrigerator for one. Even when I used to stay up at camp by myself, a billllllllion miles from everyone, I had the dogs, so that was less weird than this.

Here are the top five things that I like and dislike about this very new arrangement:

♥LIKES:

1. This bed is enormous. And I will sleep in the middle, kthnx.
2. Vegetables.
3. I find myself wandering around the city a lot, since no one is expecting me to be home. This means finding cool stores and meeting unusual people I would otherwise have rushed right past. Part of "wandering" means also just "attending"--as in, I told myself I would go to the volunteer orientation for 826DC, and instead of pretending like Tim needed me to help him watch TV, I actually went, and it was awesome.
4. I can watch whatever movie I want to, eat whatever flavor of ice cream I want to, and throw my kleenexes wherever I want to and no one can stop me. (That's right, Confessions-of-a-Shopaholic-Chunky-Monkey-On-the-Floor, whatchagonnadoaboutit?)
5. Ugh, this one actually kind of sucks: there's no division of the day between work-time and relax-time so all day is homework-time. It's helpful, but is it fun? Meh.

☠DISLIKES

1. I have to talk to Tim either over Skype (which just is not a high-quality communication tool), or wait until he calls me, because it's too expensive to call or text him. This means I'm texting lots of random people after class and asking them what they want for dinner, because that's a habit I can't fight. I feel like I have to write things down all day that I want to tell him and I'm so over it.
2. Four times I have thought someone was in my house, trying to kill me. Once, someone actually was in my house, but he was just trying to turn on the sprinklers.
3. I'm incapable of cooking for just one person, so my fridge is full of left-overs. Also, I hate any left-over older than 24 hours.
4. Every day is the same, except the two days when I have class. There is no such thing as the weekend. There is no spoon.
5. We were on the last level of World 7 of Super Mario Bros. Wii, one Boss Level away from World 8. I'm too retarded to go on by myself, which means I have to wait four months to get to World 8. No one else wants to play with me and anyway, we've come so far together I feel like it would be wrong to go on without him. UGH.

Also, because it's my blog and I do what I want, this is what I really want for my birthday and for my trip to Machu Picchu. :) I don't want to take my regular camera because I will drop it off a cliff and into a river, where it will be stolen by monkeys, but this camera is designed to withstand all of those things (except, I guess, the monkeys).

Oh, and I want the semester to be over and to go to Panama. Luckily, those two things are almost, almost in the bag.

after-bath haiku

standing counter-side
two hands to eat a mango
barefoot, 2 a.m.

The Eagle Has Landed

I can't believe how much stuff happened in the week leading up to Tim's departure for Panama. It's been beautiful in DC so we spent nearly every available second outside (when Tim's face wasn't exploding because of his allergies): we went swimming, walked from Eastern Market to Dupont Circle, got our hair cut (believe me, this is a big deal), and generally never sat down.

Last week, I volunteered at the Lannan Literary Symposium at Georgetown, which meant I got to do a lot of tech set up for these amazing talks on Literature and Democracy featuring Dave Eggars (!!!), Adam Hochschild, Chris Abani, Michael Eric Dyson, Maureen Corrigan, and Carolyn Forché. Meeting these kind of people always makes me a little bit dizzy and crazy even if our conversations only consist of "here is your microphone" and "thank you for speaking, you're way smarter than me". (Yes, that is the kind of thing I say to famous people, inevitably.)

The only problem with the symposium was that it required me to spend a lot of time on campus during Tim's last week at home. Wednesday I left home at 7:45 in the morning and didn't get home until almost midnight and was only able to eat half of a gross sandwich, some bite size cheese-cakes and beer the whole day. I also went to class somewhere in there, but I don't remember what was said. It was remarkably exhausting. But, in the true nature of exhausting activities, it was very rewarding. Particularly because I think I've found a new volunteer opportunity that I'm really, really into called 826DC. It's a non-profit tutoring center for kids that focuses on developing writing skills, something that's been sorely neglected in public schools since the advent of No Child Left Behind. It's something that I really, really believe in. But I'm also excited about it for the purely selfish reason that my own writing has been neglected since moving to DC and I think it will help inspire me to get back into it.

The only sad thing is that I won't be able to get involved until I get back from Panama. I bought my tickets on Saturday, the day before Tim left. I'm flying out on the 20th of May, and it's going to be a ridiculous summer. I fly back to DC in July only to leave 12 hours later for Colorado, then back to DC in two weeks, then 24 hours later it's on to Peru. Though apparently, our time in Panama at least will be spent in luxury as our apartment there has three bedrooms and FIVE BATHROOMS (and a pool). So between the two of us we currently have five bedrooms and seven bathrooms (and a pool), which just seems ridiculous and excessive.

In the interim between now and the day that I fly out for Panama I have a massive amount of homework and I'm getting used to entertaining myself again. It's odd, I'm very, very, very good at being alone when Tim is far away, but terrible at it when I have the option of hanging out with him instead. Yesterday I went through a stack of mail and other neglected business that took me three hours, then Alsn came over for dinner, and today I went to the comic book store on King Street I've been meaning to visit for over a year. I met the proprietor, whose name is Howard (like my dad) and who not only gave me a nice discount, but gave me two free editions of Mad House Glads, a division of Archie Comics from the early '70's. Sweet.

I just hope I can get through the end of the semester without flipping out on my professors. It's coming up way too soon and the my projects suddenly seem much larger than is humanly manageable. Hopefully by the time I'm in Panama I will find this moderate panic feeling utterly hilarious.