striking the match

I don’t care for grocery stores. Crowds of list-driven shoppers stress me out, and the plastic shopping cart handles are slick with germs. Plus, my first trip to a Boston market resulted in confrontation. When I reached around a woman’s son for a cup of yogurt, she turned and shouted, “Just tell us to move! You don’t gotta reach over us!” I rarely buy yogurt anymore.

Because I’m more or less alone in Boston, I’m spending Thanksgiving more or less alone. Grandma phoned me a few days ago. She’d ordered a “Dinner for Two” at the local Stop & Shop that would be ready for pickup on Wednesday afternoon. Sweet, generous Grandma, the woman who wants to get matching tattoos this December.

The Stop & Shop is located near Andrew Station where I wait 22 minutes for the 17 bus. The wind’s been frigid and suffocating, coming in hard and horizontal. Instead of reading on the bench, I stand huddled against the wall, my chin buried in my scarf.

The store’s yellow lights are warm and inviting, and after I jam my gloves into my bag, a security guard directs me to Deli for food pickup. The shoppers have full carts, carts brimming with spices and turkey and bread and beer. A dozen people wait at the Deli to be helped. I don’t make a move to the ticket machine. I don’t do anything. Just stare.

“Hon, you got a ticket?” asks the woman next to me. She’s got light brown eyes and a green headband keeps her curly hair from her face.

“Oh, no. No, I don’t.”

“Well take mine. I didn’t need it.” She smiles. “They’re at 181 now, so you’re next.”

My refusal to take the ticket doesn’t work, so I thank her, take the ticket, and wait.

When the man in an apron calls number 181 I give him my name. He returns with a green tote carrying turkey, mashed potatoes, butternut squash, and a pumpkin pie. We exchange smiles and he says “Happy Holidays.”

The checkout lines don’t call for much assessment: they’re all long, all crammed, and all backed up into isles of food, making the boxes of Kix impossible to reach. So I set my food at my feet and nudge it an inch or two every couple of minutes.

The time on my phone reads 5:36, and before I drop it into my purse, it buzzes with a text message from my sister. It’s a picture of us. The image is blurry, a cheap phone’s picture of a picture, but I can make out the two of us: me 5, K 2. The long half of my mullet us pulled into a ponytail, and K is wearing a white shirt with black sweats. Holding her tight, five-year-old me is giving K a big, sisterly kiss. The caption reads, “That’s us! Hahaha!”

My body suggests emotion not appropriate for grocery store lines: misty eyes, mouth pursed tight. I catch a glimpse of US Weekly and laugh at my own stupid sentimentality and slip the phone into my pocket. When I look up, the woman ahead of me waves me forward and says, “Come ahead of me.”

I thank her and tell her I’m happy to wait.

“Don’t worry a bit. You come right ahead. I’m waiting for my daughter anyway.”

She moves her flour, sugar, and celery to make room for my goods, and I’m through the checkout line in a blink.

I can’t attribute these women’s kindness to the holiday season. It would disregard the general character of a person. I think the women I encountered at the Stop & Shop are likely good, solid people. And I got lucky.

So thanks to these four ladies.

next to the peas.

I had a roommate once who wore my shoes without asking. When I found them in the corner of the common room and heavy with mud, I set a few guidelines. She quit wearing my shoes but later took to seizing my DVDs. It was a rough semester. I suppose this experienced has heightened my possession paranoia. That and the fact that I, too, am something of a bandit.

I don’t buy clothes or shoes. Ever, really. My siblings might call my method of accumulating these necessities as “klepto-like.” They’re dead right, but here’s where we separate people like me from people like my former roommate: I have rules, and they are as follows:

1. Don’t take what they love (except in the case of K’s red shorts—but I manipulated her into giving them to me, so advantage Whitney).

2. Take what they won’t miss, like T-shirts that have gone unclaimed in the laundry room for at least one month, or two weeks, depending on how much I want it.

3. Choose something you can integrate into your wardrobe, something that is very convincingly yours. If it matches the rest of your wardrobe and it looks like it could be yours, maybe it is. Pieces that so obviously collide with the rest of your clothing call attention to thievery, which is a bad. It’s memorable.

4. Denial never works. If confronted about a piece, own up to “borrowing” them. It alleviates the “lost” panic.

A huge portion of my clothing was acquired this way. The downside is that, dressed in soccer or baseball t-shirts and sweatshirts, I look like a high school gym teacher all the time. I guess we choose the trades me make.

This back story is unnecessary, but I had to give it before admitting that I’ve purchased exactly one pair of shoes in four years: my Adidas Sambas, a partnership that’s outlasted my most serious romantic relationship by six months. I wear them just about every day. After four years, even the most attentive shoe owner notices the wear, tear, and, uh, smell. SMELL? I was horrified.

I hit up Google for some cheap remedies. Buying a shoe-shaped UV light to kill bacteria was out of the question, as was simple baking soda because that would have required me to leave at 2 am and buy baking soda. No. And then there was the freezer. “Storing your shoes in a Ziploc bag and leaving them in the freezer will kill germs. Your shoes will be good as new.” Why the hell not.

I woke up today, got ready for school and work, threw my hair in a ponytail, pulled on a sweatshirt (not thieved, btw), and opened my closet door. I stared at my shoe rack for a good thirty seconds before muttering, “What the piss. Where are my shoes?”

And so began the destruction of my very organized room. Bins were emptied, shelves were cleared, a mess was made. Afraid that I’d miss my train, I settled on some grey Nikes (thieved) and headed to school.

Twelve hours later and academically zapped, I sat slumped in a chair discussing an upcoming assignment with my classmate J. She rubbed her forehead and pulled her hair out of her face and said, “I can’t wait to go home and microwave a frozen burrito. That's all I wanna do.”

I don't like frozen burritos, but I decided to be agreeable. “Frozen burritos are actually…”

And then it hit me. I’d forgotten to buy frozen burritos.

Kidding.

Chalk it up to different priorities? Lesson plans, postcolonial literature, and managing my daily, crushing anxiety?

Sorry, shoes. Today you don’t rank.

the loudest corner

My favorite place on campus is the fifth floor graduate computer center. It’s never too crowded and I have to flash my ID to get in. This makes me feel a little Secret Agent-y. Detective Whitney, reporting for computer use. ID? Yup. Cleared! Status fantasy aside, I love it because it’s warm. I sit there for hours cozily and productively reading and cranking out papers. But it closes around 9:45, which means home.

My house is not warm. It’s old and charming and really dirty (more later. HOLY CRAP, more later). My poorly insulated house wasn’t a problem until the temperatures dropped. Too cheap to turn on the heat, we tried to adapt by cooking (or in my case microwaving rice) in our hats, gloves, and sweatshirts. But at night, when we were still and body heat production was low, it was unbearable.

Because we live in an old house, we have gray radiators in each room. Mine is in the corner opposite my bed. We turned on the heat for the first time last week, and my radiator clicked and grunted once or twice but worked just fine. I took off my gloves, popped a big sleeping pill, and crawled into bed. I think I was dreaming that one of my students was a mass murderer.

At four in the morning, I woke to a thunderous clanking. Loud, metal to metal collision kind of banging. I sat up, pulled my covers close, and waited for an armed man with a crowbar to bust down the door and, you know, murder me. (Not because I’m anyone of importance, but because I have an easily followed routine and wouldn’t be missed in a city full of strangers.) I realized, though, that the clatter was coming from the corner near the radiator. Like right behind it, in the closet I refuse to use because it looks like spider mating ground.

So in an attempt to mimic bravery, I threw off my covers, opened the closet door and discovered a large piece of machinery that keeps my radiator producing the heat I so enjoy. Problem is, part of that production involves this steel-grinding cacophony. What follows is a kind of high-pitched hissing, like distant fireworks or a screaming teapot.

Downside: this happens every three-ish hours. Sometimes I’m still awake and it startles me. Other times, like on nights when I take a Xanax and watch Lord of the Rings, I wake up terrified that I’m caught in the fiery pits of Isengard surrounded by Orcs banging, shaping, working, and tempering metal swords, maces, and Medieval-style mattocks.

It’s cold, though, so the standoff between my radiator and I will persist.

But I finally bought a space heater that’s significantly less threatening.

shere kahn

I was violently allergic to cats when I was a kid. The swollen eyes, scratch-till-you-bleed sores, and hacking cough. It’s lessened as I’ve gotten a little older, but now I react to cats with an intense anxiety and concern that my body might revert back to a state of vehement rejection. So no, I’m not really a “cat person,” but I don’t have anything against them either. Sometimes I worry that we’re trying to tame teeny, tiny jungle cats, but other than shallow scratches, cats haven’t really posed too much of a threat.

It’s been five nights now that I’ve heard something like an aggressive cat standoff, but nothing cute like in Fievel Goes West; a real hissing, howling confrontation. I’m assuming it takes place out on the street (where all good face-offs should), though the reason for such a quarrel is unknown. Most of the cats I see on the street seem perfectly nice. They’d rub up against my leg if I didn’t quicken my step, I’m sure, and I didn’t hear of any attacks on the small children who paraded through our neighborhood this last Halloween.

What I know is that it’s gotten worse in the last few days. The screeching fights wind and night to reach my top floor triple-decker apartment. It’s sudden, intense, and then it subsides. By the time I got up last night, I could only hear the wind and creaking of the oak in my back yard. The cats had moved on or solved their problem.

But this morning, there was cat shit on my deck. A nice, neat coil of moist, brown feces right at my doorway.

I don’t know how a cat made it to the third floor (could be that oak and it’s branches that hang just above my deck, but that would affirm my theory that cats are in fact mini-lions), and I don’t know why it chose to defecate in the entryway.

At any rate, I hope, for the cats’ sake, that the street brawling stops. I also hope they learn about trespassing.

So way beyond 'tomato'/'tomahto'

I came here determined to learn the Boston accent. Unlike many people who believe it obnoxious, I find it kind of charming, fun, and well, attractive. Or perhaps it’s been made attractive/seductive/exotic, even, by characters in Boston-based movies, the most mainstream of which are usually tied to Matt Damon and Ben Affleck. Each movie uses, more or less, the same heavy accent.

Embarrassingly, I sorta thought that most everyone would speak like that. Thanks, Ben and Matt, for making me look like a fool.

It didn’t take me long to learn that there are a variety of accents here, subtleties based on things like neighborhood, block, background, and family as well as pronunciation, inflection, and tone. I am simultaneously sorry and not to report that not every Boston accent resurrects dialogue from The Departed, though I should mention that the drunken boys at Fenway certainly did.

I like the accents here, and it’s fascinating to be in a classroom with a handful of Boston students who don’t sound exactly alike. J’s accent is thick and sometimes slurred, clos er to the representation circulating in mainstream media, and N seems incapable of pronouncing the “ing” sound. “Learning” is “learnuhn,” and “discussing” (a word that she frequently uses in the classroom) is “discussuhn.”

The point is, I have yet to hear the term “chowdahead” even once.

But I’m still working on my accent.

A can of (really difficult, personally and politically) worms.

Class introductions are the worst. It’s strange to give a group of strangers your name and “a short introduction, whatever you feel the class should know about you.” Uh, I don’t think there’s anything that the class should know about me. I’m not that interesting, truth be told. But it’s First Day Protocol, so followed the lead of the preceding students, except for N who gave a three minute, way-too-detailed account of her/his life goals. So I said, red-faced and heart

After class, six of us walked to the campus shuttle that transports students to and from the train station. We were asking the typical questions, “Where did you get your undergrad degree?” and “How long have you lived in Boston?” and “I love your boots! Where did you get them?” And then there was a silence and a five-way glance exchange that I was very clearly not in on.

“Okay,” L finally said, “I’m just going to ask what we all wanna know. Are you Mormon?”

Crap. I laughed and focused on my shuffling feet before using a lame time-buying phrase like, “Oh, everyone wants to know, huh?” I didn’t listen to the responses and chose to boil my answer down to, “I was raised Mormon, but I’m not a practicing Mormon.” That seemed simple enough.

“What do you mean? Like you don’t believe it or…”

I shrugged. “Uh, it’s, you know, not for me, I guess.”

B leaned forward and asked said, “Can I ask about the magical pajamas?” (Why I instantly thought of Mithril from Lord of the Rings is still a mystery.)

“Oh,” I smiled, “Garments?”

“Yeah, sorry—I didn’t mean to offend. I just didn’t know what they were called. And what about polygamy? Didn’t that guy, Smith, right? Didn’t he have a lot of wives, like 20?”

And they kept on a-comin’.

“What do Mormons have against homosexuals?”

“What does your family think?”

“Why can’t Mormons have any fun?” This was, of course, a joke. And it was funny.

I’ve had too many conversations about Mormonism since I’ve been here, all of which I try to keep relatively short. I’m to offended or opposed to a dialogue, but the shuttle, all rickety and sharp-turning, doesn’t afford much time or consideration to a topic that, from my humble point of view, takes a hell of a lot of both.

Before splitting to catch our respective trains, B asked, “So, do you miss it?”

I smiled, unsure of what “it” meant and waved goodbye.

I was born here.

With a new school comes a new e-mail address, school system passwords, ID numbers, all things I worry I’ll forget and be forever locked out of academic cyberspace, unable to read or answer important e-mails from professors, peers, students. It’s an irrational fear, I know, but I let myself off the hook a little by remembering I was moving thousands of miles away from home. From humble Utah County to big Boston city. Utah lake to the blue Atlantic.

To “remember my roots” I decided to incorporate the name of my hometown into my university password. After the system rejected it for the eighth time, I assumed I’d mucked up the process and called IT for assistance.

“What’s the password you’re trying for?” he asked in his thick New England accent.
“226Orem. One word,” I said.
“Say again?”
"226Orem. O-R-E-M.”
“Orem? What’s an Orem?”
“It’s not a thing, it’s a place—where I’m from, actually—”
“Yeah, it’s not a word,” he stated, the accent thick with authority.
“Right, it’s a place,” I offered.
“It’s not a word in the system, so it doesn’t matter. Pick a different word.”
“Right. Thanks.”

In the Boston landscape, Orem didn’t register. And it still doesn’t now that I’m here. But that’s okay. I picked a different but equally satisfying password.

1:

I’m new to Boston, and I’ve never had a blog before. I already feel uncomfortable and anxious about it 1 ½ sentences in, which isn’t very promising. Tappy toes and chewing on my t-shirt collar is an indication that this, as the title suggests, may be onebigfat mistake.

But, I’m living in an incredible city and it surprises me every day. My goal, then, if blogs are allowed goals, is to record some of these shockers before they become routine. Or before I forget, which is much more likely.

Also, it’s like 3:24 in the morning, so why not start a blog?

So, Heidi, the only one who I’ll tell about this blog and the only one who will read it (occasionally) at 4 am, here you go, darlin’.

DISCLAIMER: I may (or may not) rant occasionally.