a sudden turn

It rained all day Friday, which was a nice break from the snow until I stepped in a puddle and trekked around campus all day with a wet left foot. Still, it was worth it to lay in bed that night listening to the rain against my sliding glass doors.

At 9 a.m., I locked the door behind me and my corkscrew umbrella leaves sprang into full cover. I hustled across the street and tiptoed across some black ice that was, no doubt, proof of the first snow in early December. My umbrella fluttered in the wind and I looked at my watch. Five minutes until the T arrived. A strong gust almost stole the umbrella from my gloveless hand, and I stepped off the curb and into a three-inch deep slush.

“Shit wet shoe,” I muttered.

A car whizzed past me and I jumped back on to the sidewalk to avoid its wake. Then the white sedan reversed, the treat of the tires throwing gray mush in the opposite direction.

“Ma’am! Excuse me, ma’am.”

I looked up and asked, “Me?” I’ve never been a “ma’am.”

“Yeah, hey, your backpack’s open. I didn’t want all of your stuff to fall out.”

I thanked him twice, and he nodded and said, “It was no trouble,” and sped down The Ave. toward the T stop. I slipped my right arm out of the strap and swung my green backpack to my left, resting it on my hip. It was wide open, wet notebooks and folders spilling out like a tongue from a mouth.

“Lame,” I whispered.

When the train finally arrived 14 minutes late, I sat near the doors, like always, and I imagined myself walking with an open backpack ten feet further down the road, fishing out assignments from the tiny lake accumulated between S. Street and A. Drive, umbrella rolling down the street, and hair soaked.

That man did me quite a kindness. Friday was happy.

at Heidi's request:

Thursday and Friday were the most beautiful no-coat days. I walked to school in 46 degree sunshine that I could actually feel and left my heavy wool coat and hanging in my closet. It was a brief but lovely break from the relentless Windy East Coast Chill.

It’s foolish to say that I had a hard week, because everyone has hard weeks. But I did, and I came home absolutely bushed. My body crashed, but my brain wouldn’t rest. The remedy? Around one a.m. I popped a Xanax and turned on The Devil Wears Prada and fell asleep before Anne Hathaway is reinvented into a chic Material Girl, which was a shame because I really do love a good makeover montage.

Between three and four that morning, I woke to the sound of branches cracking against my deck, to metal scraping on the pavement and tumbling down the asphalt of our charming street. In my drugged daze, I worried that the garbage cans might slam into the side my favorite green Volvo parked across the street, or that my deck would fall right off of the side of my house. I imagined it crushing my roommate J’s car, probably because she insists on leaving the backdoor unlocked so she doesn’t have to walk the 20 extra feet to our front door.

My eyes were too stubborn to fully open, too thick with medicine, but I could see my white cotton curtains fluttering at the heavy wind, a reminder that my deck doors are poorly fashioned. I turned to my left side and felt a cool breeze sweep across my face, and then my bed began to rock from side to side like a rowboat, a slave to the current. I listened to that wind all night.

When my roommate M walked into the kitchen the next morning, she looked as tired as I felt.

“Didn’t sleep?” I asked.

“No. You?"

“Not enough.”

“I kept waking up to the house,” she said and reached for her Cheerios.

“The house?” I asked through a mouthful of oatmeal.

“Yeah, didn’t you feel it rocking?”

“The house rocked?”

“Yeah. Old New England houses in the wind, they rock. You didn’t notice?”

No need for a rowboat or the salty Atlantic in 55 mile per hour gusts.

tweens are clever.

My bus route takes me past The Boston Globe and Boston’s WB headquarters. Or maybe they’re branches. At the very least, they look official enough to be important extensions. Occasionally, if the timing’s right, I get to witness flashes of various promotions for shows like 90210 or Hellcats where teenagers dress up, picket, and make choices they’ll most likely regret. If I’m really lucky, like I was today, my bus hits a red light and I get to stare in total disbelief.

This evening, girls and boys lined the sidewalk dressed as vampires to advertise tonight’s episode of The Vampire Diaries. Dozens of signs boasted heavy red and black ink, all with the same catchphrase: “Catch VD!”

Might wanna rethink the slogan, guys.

park it.

About a week ago, I tripped over a chair. To be fair, it was sitting on the street about two feet away from the curb and I was scrolling through the artists on my iPod. I walked away unharmed, intact, but puzzled about the placement of the faded green wooden chair. But it was snowing and cold and I was too nervous about school to think about the chair.

On my way from the T four days ago, I noticed another chair on the sidewalk, a neon pink camping chair that folds sorta like a tripod and is carried in a nylon bag. I’ve accumulated hundreds of hours sitting in identical chairs on camping trips and at ball games, and because it’s an outdoorsy chair, I thought, “There have been a striking number of birds nesting in and fluttering about our neighborhood, so…?” But it was dark and snowing, and I’ve been watching The Wire and am therefore afraid of everything, especially in the dark, and especially in the dark when my vision is compromised by snow. So I hurried home.

Such heavy snowfall in Boston has left little space on the streets. My neighborhood is comprised of a long, narrow road that loops, most of which is one-way. Cars drive too fast, typically, and too close to the curb. As the snow has encroached on the already modest street space, drivers have gotten more aggressive and more territorial, as demonstrated by Old Smoker Guy’s inability to wait for Middle-Aged Lady to back out of her driveway. He tried to hop the curb, but his sedan couldn’t make it past the preliminary snow bank.

Given the median-like snow stacked along the street, too many drivers and cars have been displaced. Instead of parking bumper to bumper, vehicles are separated by five-foot snow banks. And all I can think about is when they’ll melt and how the whole street will sound like water.

It snowed a bit on Sunday, and watching it from inside my home (still freezing, btw) was beautiful. Unexpected winds dove in and blew the snow off the flat New England roofs, shaking loose a gorgeous, dancing dust. The downside, I suppose, is that the city of Boston requires us to shovel all that beauty within a certain time frame.

I don’t mind shoveling the snow, so I’ve taken care of it since I got home. My roommate J, who I’ve tried to like but just really don’t, doesn’t think she should shovel snow because “I’ve done it once before already.” Well I’ve done it five times, so zip it. The point is that I tucked my sweats into my boots, slipped my gloves on, and grabbed the shovel.

For some reason at 3 p.m. this Sunday, the streets were absolutely deserted. No bodies, no cars, just snow. And chairs.

Chairs.

White plastic lawn chair. Broken bar stool. Navy square-back wooden chair. Neon pink camping chair. Wooden footstool. Markers. Chairs near the curb, not always on all fours, but staking claim to the precious blacktop.

the week my electric blanket busted.

The heat in my apartment’s not working. Hasn’t been for about a week, but I suppose that’s not the whole truth. The heat kicks on if we jack the thermostat up to just past 80 degrees, but even then the heat is patchy, poorly circulated, and more expensive than anything I own. I voted to shutoff the heat altogether, but should the pipes freeze and burst (which is likely in sub 20 degree temperatures), it’s on the renters. What this means is that we must keep the heat on without any actual heat. In short, we’re each paying hundreds of dollars to freeze.

The landlord is slow to act, as a professional assessment of the heating system will cost her money; and also because “if you can’t see you breath, it’s not that cold.” Last night when the temperature dropped to minus 7, I saw my breath. And then said the F word.

My hopes that this gorgeous, snow-packed city would warm up have been smothered. By more snow, in fact.

When I left the house today it was three degrees below zero. I opened my front door, and my first breath choked me. I hacked and gasped for a few seconds on my porch worried that my lung may collapse. That’s what three below will do to ya.

My wussy .3 mile walk to the T numbed my face, hands, and legs, despite the long underwear Mom got me for Christmas. Tiny stars crystallized on my scarf just below my mouth. This cold, it’s a whole different kind of beating.

My teeth are still ringing.

PS: thanks Heidi and Meg for reading this gibberish. Though, me in person is much worse.

a nighthawk throwback. or, why i’m a pathetic human being.

I don’t make New Year’s resolutions. My early drafts usually involve grand plans to drastically change my lifestyle and financial state with a better body and more time to travel. A once-over forces me to eliminate “volunteer in Nepal” and “backpack through Europe.” Later, Whitney. Later. A third look drops the goal “save 2,000 dollars”, as it’s a significant percentage of my overall income, most of which goes to paying rent. So this year, I’ve narrowed my scope.

As I sat by the fire tonight watching River Monsters and talking to my siblings, they began listing their own resolutions. M wants to “treat people better. Maybe. If they deserve it.” K is setting a goal she believes to be impossible: to “relax and quit taking responsibility for everyone’s actions and feelings.” True, it’ll be a doozy. S wants to finish school with a 4.0., to which he quickly added, “and get my leg press over 1000 pounds again.”

This sparked a landslide of goals committed to physical excellence, a realm I can’t very well understand. I think that’s a problem. I can hop on the elliptical machine for 30 minutes or play a (semi) competitive game of soccer, but when it comes to basic physical fitness, I’m embarrassingly out of shape.

Two days ago, as I rooted through old boxes of pictures, yearbooks (which I threw out), and old board games, I found my Presidential Physical Fitness award from the sixth grade. The Presidential award was the highest (and most meaningless) award given, and it required specific times and numbers for pushups, pull-ups, the mile run, and sprints. I can’t imagine my soft, tricep-less, 26-year-old body taking that test today. In fact, I haven’t attempted a pull-up since the sixth grade, a realization I confessed to S, after which we both descended into giggles.

So this year, I will. And I will succeed. I will complete a pull-up. That is my resolution.

orem landing.

I’m sleeping in my old room but without the comfort of handmade bookshelves, a 17-year-old desk, or the navy banana chair I gifted to my brother S before I left. No pictures, trinkets, ticket stubs, and no change on floor. The whole setup feels austere and deserted, except for my luggage in the corner. My duffle bag looks like a murder victim: deflated and gutted, the contents spilling over onto the carpet; and my scarves make for a convincing likeness of the 20+ feet of intestines once neatly coiled in my bag.

I’ve lived out of a bag before. After my parents split, we all packed up every week to cross the boundary between Lindon and Orem, different towns for each parent. Still, I can’t get used to the chaos of scattered and piled clothes, or the mingling of dirty shirts and clean jeans.

But I like my yellow room, and I’ve liked visiting Utah. I like long lunches with friends that demand a tip that almost matches the bill because, really, we sat there for three hours. I like dancing with my family to songs synonymous with seedy stripper joints. I like buckets of good food, and violent indoor soccer games that leave me winded, sweaty, and bruised. I like reading Blankets in bed until 4 a.m. I like the general warmth of people, even at 1 a.m. in the grocery store. Utah people’s good people.

But just as Utah has reminded me what I miss, it has reminded me why I left. Explaining why I’m 26 and not married has proven to be just as irritating as it was five months ago, as are the assumptions that I’m both politically conservative and an active member of the dominant faith.

They’re honest mistakes, I suppose, I hope, and though I’d never claim that Utah people are homogenous, there’s definitely a commanding mindset, and I doubt it will change much. But it’s my home, a place with a vacant room waiting for me to drop my luggage. And even in moments of sheer frustration, I can skip over to Ridley’s and get a six-pack of Apple Beer and watch The Mighty Ducks with my siblings. And that makes all the difference.