Why sometimes I think I might make a decent mom

The summer before my senior year of college, I lived in DC, doing two internships with literary agents. I also held two nannying jobs and a temp job with a nonprofit. So yes, I had five jobs that summer. It was a lot. There was a lot of driving. But it was also pretty awesome.

One of the nannying jobs was for two older kids--I believe they were 15 and 12 at the time. I wasn't really a nanny--more of a summer assistant/chauffeur/mentor/supervisor. I drove the 15-year-old (a girl) to art camp, drove them both to and from friends' houses, ran errands, took the kids on outings, and generally entertained them and prevented them from just hanging around the house all day watching TV.

In short, it was awesome. The kids were awesome and so was their mom, and that made all the difference. I totally bonded with both of them and we had such a good time together. They were hilarious and smart and fun and I actually really miss them.

Anyway, one of the episodes from that job that stands out most in my mind was on, I believe, my second day. The boy, Brad, had a doctor's appointment to get his camp medical forms completed, and his mom asked me to bring him. It was kind of a last-minute appointment as he was scheduled to head to camp the next week.

It seemed like it would not be a problem. Everything checked out fine at the doctor's office... until they got to his ears. One of them had a blockage. Flushing it out didn't fix it. Neither did flushing it again. Or flushing it a time after that.

Finally the doctor gave up and said he'd need to go to an Ear Nose and Throat doctor (ENT). Of course since he had to leave for camp the very next week this had to happen right away. The doctor made some calls and finally got us in with an ENT well out of the city in the suburbs. We got an appointment for that afternoon and headed up the highway.

There was hardly any waiting time with the ENT. In no time Brad was on the table having his ear thoroughly examined. The doctor wasn't exactly the best as far as bedside manner was concerned. Lots of throat-clearing and hemming and hawing, and grave looks. It didn't take him long to say that yes, there definitely was a blockage, it was fairly severe, and you know what? All that flushing out at the regular doctor's office probably made it worse. Tsk.

THEN, and this was the best part, the doctor turns to me and says, right in front of poor, quaking, 12-year-old Brad, "I think we're going to need to put him to sleep."

At first I thought he was kidding, you know? Like the way dogs are put to sleep? Like a misguided attempt at a joke, oh ha ha let's relax the kid by kidding about how the situation is so bad that the only way to fix it is to euthanize him? But no, he actually meant that he felt that we would need to put the kid under general anesthesia in order to remove the blockage from his ear.

My response was along the lines of: Excuse me? Why in the hell would you need general anesthesia to get something out of a kid's ear? You're not cutting anything open, you're not causing any pain... the ear canal is OPEN. That's how whatever this is got IN THERE IN THE FIRST PLACE.

The doctor was all dithering, like, oh, well, with younger kids they tend to move, and then I could stab them in the inner ear, and he's just at that borderline age...

After some back and forth I convinced him to at least TRY to get the thing out of Brad's ear. He could at least go in there and see if it came out easily. If he couldn't get it, and Brad seemed, I don't know, dangerously squirmy, I would call his mother and discuss the anesthesia.

(Even though, really? 12 years old and the doctor doesn't trust him to hold still for five seconds? And also, I've since undergone general anesthesia twice, and can I just say? Absolutely not an experience I would subject my child or a child in my care to for something as simple as an ear blockage.)

So, the doctor pulled out a pair of very alarming looking pincers, dourly warned Brad to hold still, lowered the pincers into his ear... and came out with the blockage, on the very first try.

And what was the blockage? Part of a pencil. A PENCIL. Covered with disgusting green goo. Luckily, Brad was allowed to take it home (wrapped in a napkin) to show his mom. Because what could be cooler than a slimy green pencil that has been residing in your ear for weeks on end, right?

During the car ride home, Brad was marveling about how well he could hear now that the PENCIL HAD BEEN REMOVED FROM HIS EAR. (Shocking, right?) I don't think his sister has ever felt so vindicated as when he announced, "You were totally right! I WAS shouting all the time when I thought I was just talking!"

Really, he was an awesome little brother. And she was a pretty great big sister.

Tuesday Retrospective! Let's talk bad decisions.

I have almost no regrets. I don't read much into that--I know some people think it means you're strong, or lucky, or perfectly happy in your life, and maybe all three of those things are true for me to some extent. But really I just think it's chaos theory. If you're miserable then maybe you'd have regrets because you'd wish to be in another place in your life, you know? But in my case I'm really happy with where I am so even if there are things that I would have done differently at the time, I wouldn't go back and change them because they helped me get to where I am today and be the person I am.

Still, I have definitely made some poor decisions in my life. Let's see. In no particular order:

1. Getting into a long-distance relationship with a camp boyfriend early in high school. We hardly knew each other, really. And what a waste of time and energy that was. Long distance is hard enough if you're really committed and have an end date for the distance, you know? But when you're 15 and have no idea if you'll ever be near each other, and know for sure that if you are it won't be for another four years? No, no, no.

2. Not traveling more when I was living in Africa. I wouldn't call this a bad decision exactly, because it was made more due to necessity than due to a lack of desire. I wanted to travel to countries in southern Africa and I was living in northwestern Africa, and that kind of trip wasn't easy or cheap, and I was a poor student. Still, though. It would have been great if I had found a way to make it work, because well, I was already there, I was independent, the timing was perfect. And now I'm dying to go to South Africa and Kenya and Tanzania. But hey, Torsten wants to go to those places too, and it will be fun to go with him.

3. OK, not to be superficial but in middle school I had this heinous pink sweatshirt that I wore Every. Single. Day. What was I thinking and why did my parents allow it? Although, it did work out well one year when we were supposed to write generic descriptions of friends we'd like to have, and then we looked at them all and matched up people who seemed to be looking for each other, and then it was unveiled who was who? And my best friend and I rigged it so that we'd be matched up, and one of the descriptors she used was the pink sweatshirt. We were STEALTHY, huh?

4. Not asserting myself more in high school. I went to the same tiny school my entire life, and by the time we got to high school everyone knew each other way too well, or at least thought they did. It was pretty hard to break out of the mold you'd settled in at the age of eight, and dating felt incestuous. By the time I was in high school there was all these different groups of friends and I didn't really fit into any of them, and I felt so AWKWARD about it. I didn't understand at the time that most people thought of me as "the smart one," or didn't think about me at all. I assumed that not thinking about me was the same as thinking bad things about me, when in reality I could have been a lot closer with multiple people if I had just MADE them think about me.

5. Not opening a high-yield savings account when I graduated from college and sold my car. I ended up spending a lot of that money because I wasn't really earning enough money to pay my expenses (ah, the joys of entry-level positions at DC nonprofits), even with 10 hours of babysitting a week. But in the meantime, before I spent it all, I could have made what would have amounted to quite a bit of spare cash at the time. It would have afforded me a few days off from babysitting, at the very least.

6. Relatedly, not studying more finance and economics in college. I've always been drawn to economics but I only took one econ class in college, and nothing on finance. But I do think all that stuff is so interesting, both micro and macro. And I absolutely love learning about economic markets, and especially emerging markets. I think it's so interesting to look at African economic markets, for example, and how people in Africa spend their money and how the fact that an incredibly large proportion of the population in most African countries are under the age of 15 impacts spending habits and overall economies. I find this stuff fascinating and intuitive and it would be nice to have a bit more of an academic or at least theoretical/historical perspective to apply to all of it.

7. OMG, speaking of bad fashion choices, wearing cut-off too-big men's shorts all summer when I was 14 or 15. And also, OVERALLS in middle school. I cringe just thinking about it.

What about you? Do you have regrets? Or at least poor decisions in your past?

Snippets of Senegal

Well, I've vowed not to talk about the wedding, AND it's Tuesday, so... well, I think it's time for a Retrospective! It's been awhile, huh? The timing is good, though, because I've been thinking a lot about Senegal recently, due mostly to a few chats with friends about the subject. Not one specific incident from my time there, but a few jumbled memories that could definitely use some sorting out. By the way, the full set of photos can be found here.


I was there during the dry season, and even though I hadn't expected to, I missed the rain. Dakar is a very sandy city, and sometimes I could actually taste the rain, even though there wasn't anything to taste. I had dreams about it, too. I thought about grass and that clean post-storm smell and rainbows and the way the sky gleams after a storm, and what it feels like to be caught out in the rain, and change into dry clothes after.

I totally romanticized it in my head, and I definitely deserved what I got in response--a rainstorm that caused the shallow sewers to back up and the sand to to turn to mud, so that we were essentially wading around the city up to our ankles in sheep poop. Not exactly the gorgeous, freshening image I'd had in mind.


I struggled with transportation. Relatively speaking, cabs were cheap, especially if you negotiated, which I did. But you had to know exactly where you were going, because it's not like the city was built on a grid or all the drivers were equipped with a GPS. More often than not, you'd be in a cab with a windshield covered in cracks, driving the wrong way (not that such a thing really existed) down sandy alleys while your driver honked and yelled at other drivers doing exactly the same thing and you tried to remember the Wolof for, "Turn left past the Shell station."

Otherwise, you could take a car rapide, a very old, decrepit bus type vehicle that cost about ten cents no matter where you were going. Again, difficult to navigate--a kid would hang off the back of the car, shouting destinations, and if you were like me and struggled to distinguish the syllables of Wolof, it could be hard to tell where it was headed.

One of the kids on my program was in a car rapide, sharing a seat with a Senegalese woman, when they went over a bump and the seat fell right off the wall. In rage, the woman who'd been sharing his seat, who must have been twice his size, stood up and started yelling at him about how his jaay fonde, a Wolof expression that essentially means "big ass," broke the seat.


Not long after my arrival in Senegal, we took a trip to the famous island of Goree, which is known as a historical slave trade center, although in reality very few slaves were actually brought through there. It's a big tourist destination, and the locals know it--as the ferry pulls up, there are young boys swimming in the water, and the tourists throw coins to them. The boys dive for the coins and catch them in their mouths. When I first saw the boys in the water, I thought they were just swimming. Then I realized they were catching coins in their mouths, and then I was depressed.


I lived in a neighborhood located about a ten-minute walk from a gorgeous beach. Gorgeous until you turned around and saw the ditch full of trash behind it. And until you started thinking about the implications of the mansions along the water owned by toubabs (white people) while so many people in Dakar are poor. Still, the beach was gorgeous, and we spent quite a lot of time there, sitting on the rocky steps drinking wine from a box.



My experience in Senegal was defined by people more than anything else, and yet the only friends from my time there that I stayed in touch with were other Americans. Part of that is the technology difference--not much email, not great snail mail, expensive phone calls. But part of it is the cultural difference, and the weirdness that comes from leaving behind these people that you care about, in this place that is so different from your own, and going back to your life that is cushy and comfortable by comparison. It's hard to bridge that gap, and I never really did it.

At this point, my memories of my time there are more a collection of sensory experiences than anything else. Maybe that means I've moved on. I think it's for the best.

The more they stay the same.

I've written before about my two host brothers from when I spent a year of high school living in France, but I don't think I've ever mentioned my host sister, Angéla, who is exactly my age (well, two months younger). But I've been thinking about her recently, because events in our lives seem to be coinciding, and also she won't be able to be at our wedding (although her parents and one of her brothers will be).

My French host family is or at least was somewhat dysfunctional, and I had some serious adjustment issues when I first got there. It was very complicated, but the gist of it was that the parents were having issues with Angéla, who was dating an older guy, struggling a bit in school, and generally just had an attitude that her parents didn't appreciate. All normal teenager stuff, really, but the family totally exacerbated it.

For example: They constantly harped on her about little negative things, like the fact that they thought she needed to lose ten pounds, or that she was irresponsible for not cleaning up the kitchen as soon as she got done cooking, or that it was rude of her to disappear into her bedroom the second she got home from school.

For example: She was given a ton of responsibility, including doing quite a bit of the cooking, taking care of her youngest brother (who was two years old at the time), cleaning the house, and babysitting frequently to earn money. Not that she was singlehandedly in charge of the household, not by a long shot, but her home responsibilities blew the chores that I was used to doing out of the water.

For example: Two weeks after I arrived in France, my host mother took me shopping, and while we were strolling through the mall, she casually mentioned to me that she had wanted to host an exchange student to replace Angéla as her daughter in her heart.

Yeah, that last example is worse than the first two, isn't it? I seriously thought that I had misunderstood. I had only been in the country for two weeks, and my French wasn't very good yet, and I just sort of told myself that I must have heard her wrong. I smiled weakly and nodded, and attempted to change the subject, and tried to pretend it had never happened, because for all I knew, it hadn't.

But Angéla hated me. She was rude to me and always acted grumpy around me. She said mean things to me and about me, completely ignored me when we were at school together, and complained about me and criticized me constantly. She often laughed when I made grammatical errors in French, and I could never understand why she was so nasty to me.

But then, after I had been living there for about five months, Angéla knocked on my door one evening and said she had a request to make. Apparently, her mother had, in a fit of anger, told Angéla the same thing she had told me--that she considered me a replacement for Angéla, the better daughter. Like I said, dysfunctional, right? I can't imagine ever thinking such a thing about my own child, much less saying it out loud to the kid.

Now, in retrospect, it's so clear to me why Angéla hated me so much--and honestly, even though it wasn't my fault that her mother had said those things to her, it's pretty clear that her negative feelings about me were justified. But at the time I was 17, and I didn't have much perspective about the whole thing, and I was frustrated and confused. So when Angéla asked me to stop getting good grades at school and being helpful around the house, because it was making her look bad by comparison, I just told her I couldn't do it.

And I couldn't, not really. No matter how warped their reasons were, this family had invited me into their home and truly incorporated me into their family, and I couldn't just remove myself from family life and stop participating. And I was a senior in high school, and colleges would see my grades--I couldn't just stop doing my schoolwork. But I could have been nicer about the whole thing.

The next month was spring break, and my host parents and brothers went on a road trip to visit family up north. Angéla and I were left alone for the week and given the task of stripping the wallpaper from the kitchen walls in preparation for the remodel that the family was going to start upon their return.

We didn't talk for two days. We turned on the radio and listened to French pop music in silence as we stripped the wallpaper. At mealtimes, she cooked something simple for us to eat and I did the dishes afterward. After meals, we each went to our own bedrooms, where she did god knows what and I wrote incredible amounts of letters to my friends back home.

I honestly don't remember what shifted, but I'm pretty sure she was the one to make the first friendly overture. I was just too exhausted from it all at that point, and had given up on her ever being nice to me. I can't imagine myself attempting a truce at that point. But one of us broke the ice, and by the end of the week we were chatting and hanging out, even when we didn't have to. When her parents returned, they were blown away by the difference, and my host mother informed me that leaving the two of us alone for a week had been a part of her diabolical master plan to get us to be friends.

Of course, my host mother loved to say stuff like that, so who knows if it was true, but it definitely worked. By the end of the year, Angéla and I were good friends, actually choosing to spend time together and confiding in each other about what was going on in our lives. She supported me through my breakup with my boyfriend back home and I supported her through her breakup with her older man. We played cards for hours on end. We cried when we had to say goodbye. We kept in touch. We still keep in touch.

Even though we didn't meet until we were 17, I feel like we grew up together. Which is why that I think it's awesome that she got PACSed (a form of French civil union) the same year that I'm getting married. She didn't have a wedding, and won't have one for a couple more years when they officially get married, but she loves to discuss that stuff, and we are both incredibly disappointed that she can't make it to mine. But she's in her last year of nursing school, and our wedding is in the middle of her final exams, her last hurdle before she becomes a nurse.

And she will be so good at it. I am so happy for her. Her absence is one that I will really feel on our wedding day, but I'm so glad it turned out that way, that we are close enough to miss each other when we are apart. And I fully intend to be at her wedding when it finally happens. And even though her wedding won't be in 2008, I will still consider this the year of marriage for both of us. And I'm so glad that that will be just one more bond that we share.

Of bracelets

About ten years ago, my father bought me a bracelet from the Body Shop. It's the Until There's a Cure bracelet, which costs $25 now but was $20 at the time, and the proceeds went to AIDS research. He bought it for me in honour of my uncle Michael, who died of AIDS in 1994, when I was ten. I wore it every day, painting the back in clear nail polish so it wouldn't give me a rash, until it broke in two pieces a few years later. I still have the two pieces, on my dresser.


I was pretty upset when it broke, but pragmatism won out, and I went back to the Body Shop and purchased another bracelet. I wore the second bracelet every single day from the day I got it until a day five or so years later when I was living in Senegal at age 21.

That was when I was dating a Senegalese guy with whom I was in love, Souley. I don't know if I've talked about him on here before--but if so, it was probably brief. Things ended between us only because I returned to the US, but I can see now, and in a way I knew then, that if we hadn't been separated geographically, things would have ended anyway.

Still, I loved him, and in a way I try to protect him by not talking about him on this blog, although I didn't do it in any conscious way until I started writing this post. I guess I feel that since he doesn't have fair access to the internet, and since we haven't talked in over two years, and since he doesn't know that this blog exists, and since he doesn't speak this language, and since he never did anything bad to me, it's unfair to go into the details of our relationship in this public space.

I will say, though, that I really did love him, and that both of us were flawed, as was our relationship, but that we were, for the most part, stable together. That relationship had a huge, lasting effect on me, and when I think of him, though I have no idea where he is or what he's doing, I think only positive things, and I hope that he is happy.

One thing I learned when I lived in Senegal is that all Senegalese men wear bracelets. They are given a metal bracelet when they are little, and when they outgrow it, it is melted down and made into a newer, bigger bracelet.

Souley had a bracelet too, though his was not of the type that could be melted down and recreated. He had gotten it while living in Tunisia, several years before, and he wore it every day. You can see it on his arm in this photo:


Though it wasn't his baby bracelet, it was significant to him, as my bracelet was to me. And I don't remember how we decided this, but at some point toward the end of my stay in Senegal, we agreed to exchange our bracelets.

It was hard for me to take off my bracelet and give it to him. I hesitated; I thought about my uncle and what my bracelet meant and whether I was somehow betraying my uncle by giving away his bracelet. I decided that I was not, that giving my bracelet to someone I loved wasn't equivalent to simply throwing it away. That the bracelet I received in return would be meaningful not only as a reminder of Souley, but also as a reminder of the bracelet that it replaced.

I don't know if Souley still wears my bracelet. I don't wear his. But I did, for a long time. And I still have it, in my jewelry case. I don't remember when I decided to stop wearing it. Right now, I don't wear any bracelet.

I thought about it, though. I could ask for a bracelet as a birthday gift. Or I could go back to the Body Shop and get my third Until There's a Cure bracelet. I've considered both options. Sometimes my right wrist feels bare. But I still don't know with what, or if, I want to adorn it.

The best and worst class trip.

I've taken a lot of very cool school trips--to France, to Cape Cod, to the Smoky Mountains. But whenever I think of the coolest school trip I ever took, I always think of my French class trip to Poland in 2002. It was my senior year of high school and I was studying abroad, and I thought it was just so awesome that we could drive to Poland. In a bus. Through Germany and the Czech Republic. In fact, I still think it's neat that Europe has so many little countries, like US states, and you can just drive from one to the next.

The weird thing is that when I look back on that trip, it wasn't exactly fun. I mean, it was definitely neat. And it definitely had an impact. But socially, it was extremely frustrating.

I saw incredibly cool things. We spent a night in Nuremberg. We visited Auschwitz. We spent several days in Poland, which is where my grandfather is from. I woke up on my 18th birthday in Prague to find it snowing. It was an eye-opening trip.


But the whole time that I was in France, I struggled with friendships. Several people in my class actually told me that I seemed like a pretty cool person, but they didn't want to bother becoming friends with me because I was just going to leave in a year. I was in a small public school in a village with a bunch of kids who had known each other forever, and the whole time I felt like I was on the fringes, always having to be the one who instigated anything social. I was never invited to parties and I never knew who to eat lunch with.

There were a few girls in my class I was friendly with, and occasionally we did stuff together outside of school, but that was about the extent of it. When we went to Poland, we spent a total of about 72 hours in the bus over 10 days. Everyone had a seatmate, an automatic buddy, and I ended up sitting next to a very nice girl who was part of a trio of friends, which meant that one of them didn't have a seatmate. She was friendly, but very involved with her friends.


Every time we stayed at a different hotel or hostel, it was a struggle for me to figure out who to room with. I always had to wait to see who had an extra spot and shove myself in with them, feeling distinctly unwelcome. One girl in my class invited me to share a room with her and her friends one night, only for me to be told by one of her friends that I shouldn't really be there because they had been looking forward to hanging out with just their group of friends during that trip, and I wasn't a part of that.

It was hard for me because it felt so foreign--I had never had trouble making friends before. And I was abroad and had this feeling like the experience was supposed to be life-altering and I was supposed to make these friends who would last forever. I felt like I should be bonding with these people and that I wasn't making the most out of my year abroad if I didn't. But I couldn't.


There was one day toward the beginning of the trip when I ended up sitting next to a guy who had always been nice to me, Scott, in the bus. It was morning, and my hair was wet from the shower. We were driving a long way and both fell asleep, and at some point I woke up with my head on his arm. Then he got up and went to talk to a friend of his and I went back to my own seat on the bus.

Later, a girl from my class came up to me and said she thought I should know that everyone was saying that I had licked Scott's arm in the bus. She had defended me, she claimed, but everyone believed him.

I ended up confronting him about it, in front of McDonald's in Prague, where we had gone to eat because our teachers didn't know where else to feed us. We went back and forth for awhile, with me asking what the hell he was thinking, and him saying that he woke up with his arm wet and what was he supposed to think, and me saying that maybe my wet hair that was on his arm had been what he had felt and why hadn't he just come to talk to me before spreading a nasty rumour, and him asking me again what he was supposed to think about his arm being wet. We went around in circles like that for awhile before he finally told me to go fuck myself and stormed off.

Incidentally, that guy never talked to me again, and in fact rudely ignored me when I would bump into him with a friend--he would always kiss the friend's cheek and look right through me like I wasn't even there. A year or so after I got back to the US, I heard that he was in jail in France for killing someone during a drug deal, supposedly in self-defense.


That trip was also when I admitted to a boy that I liked him for the first time. Did you know that in French there's no simple way to tell somebody you like them? "I like you" actually means "I love you," and the only word for having a crush on someone is vulgar slang. I actually asked some of my classmates how they would say they had a crush on someone, and they had no idea. "You attract me" and "You please me" were the two suggestions I heard.

So, one day while we were in Poland and the group was walking down the street, I found myself next to the boy I liked and figured that I was already so isolated from everyone that I might as well tell him I had a crush on him, because what harm could it do? So I said to him that he pleased me. He politely said thank you. I pushed the issue. "No, you please me."

"Oh," he said. Then he sped up and walked away from me to catch up with his friends.

The next day, a rumour started that I had asked that boy to have a threesome with me and another boy in the class. It was so ridiculous that I could not understand how it even caught on. When I asked one of my classmates how she could possibly believe it, she said, "Well, you did lick that other guy's arm."

Non-boyfriend

When I was 15, I spent three weeks at an academic summer program for high school students. The program was really about allowing academically gifted students to socialize together, the idea being that they were probably isolated at their own high schools. I wasn't, but I loved the summer program and attended for four years. Age 15 was my third year, and it was the year I met Jason.

Jason and I met on the first day of camp, when I was wandering around the halls of the dorm, randomly introducing myself to people whose doors were open. I don't know if things are different when you're 15 or what, but I don't really remember a transition period. I remember meeting him, and I remember spending the rest of camp with him, but I don't remember how we got that way.

I do know that everyone at the entire camp thought we were going out. And I remember wondering why the hell we weren't. We were literally together whenever possible. The campus had these huge benches--although the word "bench" really doesn't do them justice. They were more like huge, painted wooden structures, highly elevated with lots of comfortable seats. There was one outside each dorm and they were the main hangout points during all free time. And we spent hours on ours.

We would just sit, for a long time, talking and poking each other and chatting with other people. Jason played the guitar and often he'd have it with him, just messing around, and sometimes other people would show up with their guitars and they would jam together. I had no musical talent but I loved to sit and listen.

There were dances every Saturday, and Jason and I spent them together, but not dancing. We usually spent them on that bench. One week during a dance I got up the courage to ask him who he thought the three prettiest girls at the camp were. He named two girls, both friends of ours, and then he paused.

I still remember the sideways glance he gave me, and the tight anticipation I felt while I waited for him to say something. And then he said, "And you," and for one of the very rare moments in my early teens, I felt exactly how I wanted to feel because I had heard exactly what I wanted to hear from the exactly right person.

There were other signs too, other moments where pleasant silences turned into awkward moments of maybe we should be kissing. But those were moments where that tense waiting didn't release into that euphoria of feeling exactly how we wanted to feel, because we were both too awkward, too shy or uncomfortable or something, to push through the awkwardness and just do it.

Really, I would have done it because I wasn't shy, really at all, not by then. Except that despite not being shy, I was massively insecure, and even though from this charmingly grownup, distanced perspective I now have, it is so, so obvious that he liked me as much as I liked him... well, at the time I wasn't sure.

I thought I had given him so many opportunities that if he liked me, he would have taken me up on them. I thought about all the times that someone had asked us if we were going out and he had vehemently denied it. Even though I was equally vehement in my denials, when it was him doing the denying, I thought it was proof of the one-sidedness of my feelings.

But when we were outside and it was cold, he gave me his soft flannel shirt to wear. He played Brown Eyed Girl to me on his guitar while we were sitting in the hallway of the dorm. He hugged me, touched me all the time. He told me I was the prettiest girl in the whole camp.

At the time, at 15, when I desperately wanted experience and desperately needed affirmation that somebody could like me, those things weren't enough. But now, looking back, they are.

I'm so glad high school is over.

When I was spending the year in France, I had a big day where three things happened to me at once. It was December 17, 2001. Today is December 18, which is close enough that I'll consider it the six-year anniversary. So that's what we're going to have to discuss.

I had arrived in France on August 28, two weeks before 9/11 happened, so by the time December 17 rolled around, I had been living there for almost four months. I was in a public high school in a rural area where students came from tiny villages within a 20-kilometer radius. Originally, I had thought that I was the only American in the school, but I found out on September 11 that there was one other, Andre. I found this out because we were at school when the attacks happened (with the time difference, it was about 3 p.m.), and everyone was staring at us to see how we'd react when we all found out.

Anyway, I guess an experience like that can really make you bond, because even though Andre and I would most likely never have become friends if we'd been living in the US, we became really close over the next few months. We hung out all the time (probably not good for our progress learning French), and he was there when my wallet got stolen out of my purse in downtown Toulouse. He was the one who lent me money to call my parents from a pay phone, sobbing, to ask them to cancel my credit card.

Andre had originally been scheduled to spend only one semester in France, but he changed his mind while he was there and tried to extend his stay for the full year. However, he found out in November that his school back home wouldn't accept a full year's worth of credits from our French school, so he couldn't stay for an extra semester unless he was willing to graduate from high school a year late. Which he was not.

So, on December 17, at six a.m., he left. A group of friends saw him off at the train station, where he took the TGV to Paris to catch his flight home.

At about 10:30 that morning, at school, we had a break between classes and I went to the computer lab to check my email. I had one waiting for me from my boyfriend of a year and a half, who was in college in Canada. He emailed me every day, but this one was titled "Do not read this at school."

Think about it. If you want someone to do something, what's the best way to get them to do it? Tell them not to. Obviously I can't leave an email with a subject like that untouched. So I opened it. And in it, he broke up with me.

I totally fell apart. He was my first serious boyfriend, the first guy I'd ever been in love with. When I had gone to France and we had discussed the overseas long distance thing, we had agreed that if one of us decided that we couldn't take it anymore, we would tell the other over the phone. He had promised me that if he broke up with me, it wouldn't be over email.

I cried for the rest of the day. Everyone stared at me, and teachers dismissed me from classes. Being a foreigner definitely has its advantages, and one is that you don't always have to explain yourself.

That night, my French host parents went out for dinner, just the two of them, and the kids, myself included, all went to bed. I couldn't sleep. It was the first time I'd experienced heartbreak and it was awful. Nothing had ever prevented me from sleeping like that. I just couldn't deal with the pain, and I couldn't even call Andre because he was on a plane back to the US. The phone rang while I was lying in bed, but I didn't answer it, and everyone else was asleep or not home.

When my French parents got back, I got out of bed to say hello to them. My host mother was listening to the voice mail, and just as I got into the kitchen, where she was standing, she thrust the phone into my hand. I put my ear to the phone just in time to hear my mother say, "I wish we were there to be excited and jump up and down with you! Congratulations!" I called her back and it turned out that she had just received my acceptance letter--I had gotten into college (that link is there for those of you who keep asking where I went to school).

I had applied early decision to only the one school, and if I hadn't been accepted, I would have had to madly fill out college applications from abroad, which would have involved lots of FedExing and stress and crappy, last-minute personal statements. I had already had to do that with my National Merit essay, and the idea of doing it for multiple college applications makes me wonder what the hell we were thinking when we decided we'd bank on me getting into the one school I applied to. But luckily, I did, and also luckily, I didn't answer the phone when my mother called, because I would not have been able to fake excitement on the spur of the moment.

It's funny, remembering that day. At the time, it was so awful, and so momentous, and I was so exhausted that it just felt like cruel irony that that day was the one when I got into college. Even though I was so tired, I didn't sleep all night. I was too upset about my boyfriend, and felt too alone, and the time when I wouldn't be in France anymore and I'd be in college and supposedly have friends and whatnot just felt so far away.

And now I'm on the other end of it, and college was great and I have never regretted my choice to go to the school that I did, and I'm so lucky to have the friends that I made there. And Andre and I are still friends, although we hardly ever talk, and the amazing thing is that I'm still friends with that ex-boyfriend as well.

Do you have friends now that back in the day, you never would have expected to stay friends with?

Seven-problem sublet

Thank you all so much for your kind words about Cava. The last couple weeks have been challenging, even before I found out about the dog, and it meant a lot to me to see all the sweet things you guys said. I wasn't sure I felt like writing a Tuesday Retrospective this week, but I decided it would be good to distract myself, so I decided to write about something that is, in retrospect, funny. At least to me.

The summer before my senior year of college, 2005, I lived in DC with a good friend of mine, Tamar. I had two internships with literary agents, as well as two nannying jobs and a temp job at a non-profit. I had just gotten back from my semester in Senegal and my sister had just gotten married. I had set up all my jobs from Senegal, using the internet. I was lucky that so many people were willing to hire me without having met me in person.

Tamar was still at school up in Massachusetts, so my sister, who lived in DC, was in charge of finding us housing. She found us a great apartment to sublet for the summer, but at the last minute it fell through and we had to scramble to find something else.

The something else turned out to be the basement of a nice house in Takoma Park. It was really like its own apartment without a kitchen--it had a living room, a bathroom, and a bedroom with a smaller room off it that we used as a second bedroom, as well as its own separate entrance. We were told we'd get this basement to ourselves, as well as unlimited access to the upstairs kitchen that we'd be sharing with the main renter of the house as well as another subletter. The basement was a little damp, but pretty much okay, especially for people desperate for housing, as we were at that point.

Everything started out fine. I had this crazy schedule, working one or two of my five different jobs every day. But it was good, really, and I was making plenty of money and also getting good resume experience and all of that. Some days I got to work from home, just reading manuscripts, which was fine or at least would have been fine if I'd actually had the basement apartment to myself as promised.

The first thing that went wrong was that our landlord turned out to be this passive-aggressive, holier-than-thou wholesome type. She taught ESOL (English for speakers of other languages, in case anyone didn't know--the PC replacement of ESL), and had her students call her Tia. She did a lot of yoga. She shopped only at the organic food co-op down the street.

Not that there's anything wrong with those things. We shopped at that co-op, too, and I have a yoga/pilates exercise DVD from Netflix waiting for me at home right now. It was more the way she was so smug about her lifestyle choices that was irritating. For example, one night Tamar and I went to Cheesecake Factory and brought the leftovers home. The next day, a magazine article about the 10 worst foods for you, which included Cheesecake Factory, appeared on the door of the refrigerator.

Anyway, we could have mostly ignored our landlord, except that then the second thing went wrong. The second thing was that she started a summer camp for children at her house, in the basement, otherwise known as our apartment. Not only did this badly interfere with my ability to work at home when necessary, but those brats were loud and woke me up early even on days when I wasn't going to be staying in. When we tried to discuss this with her, we were informed that she assumed we'd be working 9-5 and wouldn't even notice the kids.

Except that even if she had been correct about our traditional 9-5 schedules, we would have noticed the kids, because problem number three was that she left their artwork all over our apartment every night. The worst was when they did big painting collage things that had to be spread out overnight to dry, and thus covered every surface, including our couch, meaning that we essentially had no living room.

Problem number four was that the basement had bugs. Specifically, it had some sort of cricket spider thing that Tamar referred to as "hoppy bugs." They were extremely disgusting and they could leap really high in the air, making it horribly nerve-wracking to try to kill them, because if you missed then they could jump anywhere, including on you. They kept appearing, consistently, every few days all summer. It was awful.

Problem number five wasn't that big of a deal, since I'm naturally not a terribly clean person, but there was very limited space for me to keep my stuff, so most of it ended up piled on the couch and the floor. That wouldn't have been a big issue either, if it weren't for problem number six.

Problem number six was that the power went out, and while it was out, the basement flooded. This had something to do with the fact that the toilet was below-ground and therefore had some sort of electric suck-pump that didn't function properly when the power was out. Of course, we didn't know that. It was a Saturday night and there was a huge thunderstorm. Tamar and I were sitting on the couch in the living room, talking, until about three in the morning. In the dark, of course, since like I said, the power was out.

Then I got up to pee, and stepped in a puddle. Investigation by flashlight showed that there was water all over the floor of the living room, the bathroom, and of course, my bedroom. You remember, I presume, that problem number five had to do with me keeping my stuff all over the floor of the bedroom. So of course the bedroom flooded too--because how else would all of my stuff have gotten thoroughly soaked?

Anyway, there was (clean-ish) water pouring down the base of the toilet, and we could not figure out how to make it stop. We tried turning the water line off but no matter which way we turned the knob, nothing changed. We ended up having to call the property manager, who told us how to turn off the water but also informed us that even though this whole fiasco was obviously not our fault, we might be held liable if there turned out to be water damage.

Of course, our landlord had conveniently left on a two-week trip to Guatemala a couple days earlier, so it was just us. We dug around upstairs with our flashlight and found a mop and a child-size bucket, and ended up taking turns mopping (and emptying the tiny bucket outside every three minutes) and holding the flashlight. We were up until six a.m., scrubbing. Tamar ran back upstairs and got some towels, which I later found out were our landlord's good towels. Call us bitches, but it was so satisfying to use them to clean up the flood.

The property manager sent out a cleaning service to deal with the aftermath the next day, so we wound up spending the next week with huge, loud, industrial green fans blasting in our apartment. But the three hours of mopping by flashlight had prevented any permanent water damage, so we were at least spared a battle over that expense.

Problem number six seemed like it put a lid on the whole summer, and the whole ridiculous subletting experience, but no. Really it was just a warm-up for problem number seven. A dress rehearsal, if you will.

Problem number seven was that we got evicted. We had found out earlier in the summer that our sublet was illegal because our landlord had a no sublet clause in her lease, and we had also found out that in the state of Maryland it's illegal to use a room without a window or a second door (such as Tamar's room) as a bedroom, so we had been a little nervous about the whole thing, but as it turned out, that wasn't the reason we got evicted. Our landlord had failed to tell us when we moved in that there was a clause in her lease that stated that if the house owners wanted to move back to Takoma Park for any reason, they had only to give her thirty days' notice and she would have to get the hell out. I guess the owner had some issue with his new job and decided he wanted to move back home. So it wasn't just us who got evicted--it was our landlord, too.

Of course, she didn't tell us that as soon as she got the thirty days' notice. First she procured another house, even further from the Metro than the current house (which was already a 15-20 minute walk away). Then she told us that surprise! We'd all be moving together! And wasn't that fun! And it wasn't an issue that one of us would be staying on the second floor of the new house with her while the other would be living in the basement, right?

This happened with about a month left in the summer, so Tamar just quit her internship and went home early, and I moved in with my sister for the last three weeks. Getting evicted was pretty much the best thing that happened to us that summer.

What was the worst living situation you've ever had to deal with?

Update: Tamar has just read this post and reminds me of many, many other problems that I totally forgot about. She wants me to clarify that this was at least a 17-problem sublet. I must have blocked the other problems out. But they bear repeating. Here's Tamar's contribution:

• The saw in the couch. [We found a handsaw in the couch by almost sitting on it and when we expressed concern she said, "Ah, I was wondering where that went."]
• The sour yogurt smell in the fridge.
• The rigging of our cable so that it was a jungle. [We couldn't pee without crawling both under and over cables.]
• That she only had one mop and only had kiddie buckets so we had to mop with only one mop and only tiny buckets and the property manager kept yelling, "Put your sheets down! Your blankets! Babies poop all the time and if they can get cleaned so can sheets!" instead of telling us how to turn the water off.
• When she surprise retroactively upped our rent when we decided to move out because Mal [Tamar's girlfriend] had been around.
• That "wireless internet" meant "stolen from next door maybe."
  
• The Korean roommate who kept talking about dirty Americans even though she was born and raised in Ohio.
• The bathtub burping things up!
  
• The door that wouldn't lock.
  
• The caulking so we couldn't shower, in DC, in the summer, for two weeks. [I feel compelled to add that we DID shower. We just had to use the upstairs shower, and share it with the landlord and the other subletter. We are not dirty people.]
  
• How she advertised as a "young professional" but was a 50-year-old divorced yoga teacher.
• Her random, ever-changing kitchen rules.
  
• The branchless, leafless Christmas tree with the peace sign.
  
• How she forcibly re-futoned my bed and moved my sheets.
  
• Her ongoing battle with the city to keep old furniture on the porch.
  
• The chanting women's circle and discussions of egg freezing.
  
• The hoppy bug that died in my water glass that I almost drank in the night ARGH DISGUSTING.
  
• Also, the peppermint smell of the industrial cleaner.

Happy old friends

My first year of college, I was lucky enough to have a fantastic roommate, Brooke. She is one of those people whom everyone loves--a genuinely cool, interesting, nice person with a magnetic personality. I don't know if we ever would have become friends if we hadn't shared a room, but we got along great. She turned me on to Sex and the City and coppery lipstick. We rearranged the furniture fairly regularly. We had parties where we tried to turn our beds into couches. One weekend I came back to our room at around two a.m. to find a raging game of drunken strip poker taking place. Some guy I had never met before was sitting butt naked on my desk chair. It turned out that she had never met him before either.


I had another great friend my first year of college, Toby. Toby lived one floor above Brooke and me, and I don't remember how we became friends, but I do remember that I was her first friend at college--not because she had trouble making friends but because we went to college in her hometown and so she spent most of her time with her high school friends. Toby is an amazing actor and director and writer. Once when we were walking back from a play she had been in, she was happy and excited and it was snowing and the middle of the night and she just leapt off a porch in a graceful swan dive right into a bank of snow. Brooke and I followed, slightly less gracefully. The three of us were great friends.


The three of us didn't do everything together, but they fill my memories. Before Brooke transferred, the three of us all came back to school after winter break several weeks before classes started again. We spent most of January wandering around in the snow, going to movies, helping Brooke pack, drinking wine and apple cider and amaretto sours, sleeping, going to coffee shops, and generally being depressed at the fact that Brooke was leaving.


Our sophomore year, I got a single room and Brooke and Toby were roommates, two floors up. But Brooke transferred to a new school halfway through the year. As a going-away present, we gave her a framed photo of the three of us, a great photo that unfortunately I do not have scanned. We stayed in touch, but it faded. At this point Brooke and I talk maybe twice a year. Toby and I stayed friends, but we each became more wrapped up in other friends as college proceeded. I think of Brooke and Toby as freshman- and sophomore-year friends. But also, lifetime friends.

Sisters

My sister is two and a half years older than me. I've posted about her before, briefly. We both live in the DC area and we get along very well. We haven't always, though. We never hated each other, but we fought a lot when we were younger. Stupid things like who got to sit in the front seat of the car or whatever. But we were definitely squabblers. I followed her around and she hated it. She bossed me around and I hated it. She always conned me into making trades that were extremely advantageous to her when we played Monopoly. I always got jealous that my friends wanted to hang out with her when they came over.


So no, I definitely wouldn't say that we were best friends growing up. But we were always sisters, we always had that shared understanding of our lives and families that only siblings can have. Still, though, when she left home, everybody was surprised at my reaction.

Though she's only two and a half years older than me, she was always four grades ahead of me because of when our birthdays fell and because she skipped a grade in elementary school. So when she left home, it was the beginning of my freshman year of high school. She was taking a year off before college and going to Spain to live with a host family. She left five days after her 17th birthday. The whole family came to the airport to see her off.

I had hurt my ankle that day at school and was on crutches. It was before September 11, so we were all allowed to go to the gate with her. The gate was very far away from the ticket counter. I had to speed along on my crutches, which I hadn't really learned how to use, and finally gave up and ended up walking on my bad ankle, using my crutches for support. It hurt for weeks after that.

When my sister said goodbye and turned to walk down the ramp to the plane, she cried. A lot. And so did I. I remember what she was wearing--black pants and a blue and white striped top. She had a pack of mint gum so that she could clear her ears on the plane, and before she left she gave me a stick. I sobbed. So did she, but she had more reason, because she was leaving everything. I didn't think she was particularly crying about leaving me. I still actually don't know if that was really a factor.

I cried and cried. I watched her walk away down the ramp, crying, and I cried more. I wanted to stay and watch her plane take off, something my family was not in the habit of doing. My parents were so shocked by the extent of my reaction that they allowed it. We sat in the seats by the window and stared at the plane until it left the gate about half an hour later. I cried the whole time. I cried way longer than my mother.

On the way home, I chewed the mint gum, which probably wasn't a good idea, because I was still sobbing. I almost choked on the gum. My mother made a comment about how she wasn't expecting me to be so upset and I cried so hard that I could barely even answer. When we got home, I wrote a really long journal entry about how traumatized I was. I had stopped crying when I began, but writing it made me cry some more.

The amazing thing was that my sister leaving home was what made us close. We talked every week while she was in Spain. I would waste time telling her about the latest baseball games. She wrote me emails--it was the first year I'd had an email account. When she got back, I had grown several inches and I had to bend over to hug her. We've been very good friends ever since.

Not quite like Savage Garden

Stephanie's post yesterday talked about how she cried in a restaurant this weekend, and it reminded me of the time that I also cried in a restaurant, earlier this year. This is the most recent event that I've written about for the Tuesday Retrospective, but things are so different now that it certainly feels like a memory more than a current event, and that's the main criterion for this feature, so I'm going to write about it anyway.

Unlike that Savage Garden song, I didn't know that I loved Torsten before I met him, although we did meet online so there was a period of about a week and a half when we were emailing back and forth without having actually met each other. And during that period, both of us knew (or suspected) that we had found something exceptional, but were afraid to admit it since it seemed so crazy, which is why we met up in person as soon as possible.

Torsten knew that he loved me very soon in our relationship, but I was slower to be sure. I'm not sure if he had a moment when he knew that he loved me, but I did--one exact event that crystallized in my head the fact that I was in love with this man. It was the Sunday of the Oscars, which I think were in late February this year, which would mean that Torsten and I had been dating for about four and a half months. We had slept late and then gone for brunch at Bread & Chocolate, which used to be one of our favourite places until we decided to try to be healthy. I don't remember what we were eating but I do remember that we were in a booth toward the back of the restaurant. It was snowing, also.

My sister had planned an Oscars party for that night and I had told her that both Torsten and I would be there, but when we were eating brunch, Torsten was saying that he didn't really feel like going, with the bad weather and the fact that we'd be out so late and the work he had to do that day. I was really upset by this and said something to him about how much it bothered me that he never wanted to do things with my friends or go out and be social (okay, "never" might be an exaggeration, but I'm not known to play fair when I'm upset, and a little drama never hurt anyone, right? Not right? Oh).

Anyway, I was getting more and more upset and Torsten was getting confused, and trying to explain himself. And then he said to me something about how he wasn't sure when I invited him to go places with my friends if I really wanted him to come or was just inviting him out of some sense of obligation. This was such a strange concept to me that I stared at him and said something like, "Why would I ever want to be without you?" And then I burst into tears.

See, I told you I was dramatic. But damn it, it was right then, exactly then when I was sitting in the middle of Bread & Chocolate, crying in the face of my shocked boyfriend, that I knew I was in love with him. Although it was another couple of months before we actually said those words to each other.

It's amazing, now, to think that there was ever a time when I didn't know I loved him, or when he would be worried that I didn't really want him to come with me when I invited him somewhere. Because really, who wouldn't want this sweetheart to come with them everywhere they went?

Guest Post: Stephanie

Many of you know me as Stephanie from This Corner of the Earth, but today I have the honor and privilege of giving you a Tuesday Retrospective while Jess is in Germany. When Jess asked us what she should do about her blog when she'd be away, I was thinking Guest posters! Pick me!. A couple days later, when I received an email from Jess asking me to guest post for her Tuesday Retrospective, I got really excited. I am cool and I love Jess! Then really nervous. I suck and don't have anything to write about! Anyhow, I'm thrilled to be able to keep up the Tuesday tradition while she's is gone. She is a fantastic writer and more importantly, a sweet, kind and thoughtful person whose comments have helped me through some tough times and I'm so glad we're gotten to be bloggy friends over the past few months!

I wanted to be a professional dancer for all of my childhood. I don't remember how I first got into dancing, but in kindergarten, my mom signed me up for ballet and tap classes at "Miss Donna's" dance studio. Each year at Miss Donna's culminated in June with a studio-wide recital where our parents and grandparents and unfortunate siblings watched a two-hour (much too long) montage of young girls in sequined tulle costumes dancing to various show tunes.

I was always the tall one, always in the back row, center, so as to make the formations symmetrical and I loved my place in the semi-spotlight. For my first recital, my class danced to "Easter Parade", complete with wicker hats and a chorus line-esque kick sequence at the end of the routine. We were five years old.

Thanks, Mom, for the blue eyeshadow and flaming cheeks.

I loved my first year of dancing at Miss Donna's and was an above average dancer (for a five year old) so my mom signed me up for year after year, dumping hundreds of dollars into costumes I'd wear for one number in that glorious annual recital.

When I was about ten years old, my class and I had a killer tap dance to "King of New York" from Newsies (which I still have not actually seen) that won us trophy after trophy at competitions around the state. I still know every word to that song and can probably still tap my way through half of the routine. That same year, we had a ballet routine to a Nutcracker Suite medley and in the beginning of the year, when Miss Donna announced that one girl would get to dance as Clara and the rest would be toy soldiers, I immediately thought of my friend Erika. She was tiny, seemingly breakable, and a fantastic dancer at that. She had been in small roles in the Rochester City Ballet and I envied her. I thought I would be a toy soldier in the back row, center, as usual. When Miss Donna announced that I would be Clara, I thought it would finally be my break into a professional dancing career. My performance was fine, I got to exit the stage on a sleigh and I may have emphasized the fact that I had a SOLO performance to my fellow dancers a bit too often, but a professional dancer I was not.

Maybe this costume is why I never became a professional dancer?

As I got older, I added jazz, modern, lyrical and pointe to my weekly class schedule and was still the tall girl in the center of the back row. Because of my size (I was certainly thin, but I don't remember the last time I was shorter than 5'8") I knew I would never become a dancer with the American Ballet Theater, let alone the Rochester City Ballet, so my entrepreneurial spirit led me to want to open a dance studio instead. I was a good dancer and also very organized so I thought it would've been the perfect job for me.

As I entered my first year of high school, after a two year hiatus from the real world spent being homeschooled, I was overwhelmed with my new friends, changing classes at each bell, figuring out where to sit at lunch and opening my locker that dance was pushed to the end of my to-do list. My new friends were cheerleaders and so naturally, I wanted to be a cheerleader. My mom recognized the time crunch that would occur if I were to do both activities so she made me choose one. I chose cheerleading.

At Nationals senior year of high school. I'm on the left. And the gigantic Minnie Mouse bows? Don't ask.

Cheerleading became my life and I continued it for four years of high school and all three years of college. Go Mustangs! Go Eagles! was my mantra for 7 years and I met great friends, was in fantastic shape and had so much fun during that time. But I have always looked back and wondered what I could've done had I not chosen cheerleading. Had I picked the passion that I'd had my whole life. I may have opened a dance studio or continued my dance education into college, or I may have ended up exactly where I am right now. Now, as an adult, I take dance classes at the gym and that's enough to keep living out my childhood dreams.

Where or what would you be if you'd followed your childhood dreams?

Sensitive skin

I took my first unaccompanied plane trip at the age of eight, from North Carolina to my grandmother's house near Albany, New York. It was because of this trip that my mother decided I was old enough to own a real, grown-up watch--in part because if I was grown up enough to travel by myself, I was grown up enough to take care of nice things, and in part because I wouldn't have anyone to tell me the time in the airplane.

My dad took me shopping to pick out my watch. I can picture the jewelry counter we stood at, and the lighting and layout of the store, but I'm not totally sure what store it was--possibly Wal-Mart. I was allowed to pick out any watch I wanted within a certain price range.

It was 1992, and watches like the Baby G hadn't quite caught on yet. With my always impeccable eight-year-old taste, I opted for a stylish watch much like a middle-aged woman might wear. It had an embossed leather strap, fake gold around the face, a rainbowy-hologram type face, and little fake crystals instead of numbers. I searched the internet in vain for a photo of a similar watch, but I did find one that demonstrated the basic structure:


Yeah. It was like that, except with the hologram thing and the crystals, like I said. Obviously the height of fashion for the third-grade set, except not at all. But I loved it, with a fiery burning passion that was, at the time, pretty much unequaled. My dad tolerantly agreed with me when I repeatedly insisted, "Isn't it SO PRETTY? Don't you LOVE IT?" and paid the cashier.

God damn, I was so proud of that watch. I kept it in its box until the day of my trip, reverently look at it several times each day. On the day of the plane flight, I put on the watch, and when I had to go through the metal detector at the airport, I was so proud that I got to take it off.

The day after I arrived at my grandmother's house, I woke up with my left wrist all itchy and covered in bumps. My grandmother said that it was probably poison ivy, so she slathered my wrist in calamine lotion and told me to wear my watch on my right hand so as not to irritate the rash any further. The next day, I woke up with the same rash all over my right wrist.

The doctor said that I was most likely allergic to nickel, a common allergy in kids that I might one day outgrow. The best way to tell for sure was to tape a nickel to my forearm and see if I developed a rash. I tried it, and the proof was there. Stainless steel has nickel in it, so from that point forward, I was relegated to only plastic things touching my skin.

My parents and I soon discovered that nickel touches your skin in the most unexpected ways. For instance, I would get rashes on my stomach where the back side of the button of my jeans pressed against my skin. We solved that problem by painting clear nail polish over the metal, but the watch had too much metal, including the little knob for setting the time, for that solution to work. My beautiful, stylish watch was relegated to a drawer, where I was never able to wear it again. And I cried. A lot. My parents took me to look for a plastic watch, and that was when we discovered that even plastic watches almost all have stainless steel backs. All except one, which I ended up being forced to get, more or less against my will. It looked like this:


It might have been more age-appropriate than my old-lady watch, but I hated it with as much intensity as I had loved the other watch. Even now, I can't stand Disney anything, or that particular shade of pink.

The doctor was right that the allergy would fade with time, but it never faded completely. I can only wear earrings for a few hours at a time, and if I wear a necklace on a humid day and sweat at all, I get a nasty rash on the back of my neck. So my preferred metals are gold and, of course, platinum. What can I say? Apparently, I have expensive taste, and my skin agrees.

My first (and only) car

I have owned only one car in my life, and unlike Tessie, mine was not a charming junk heap made primarily out of rust like most people imagine when they think of first cars. No, mine was a new car, and not just any new car: it was a Volkswagen New Beetle, obtained a few weeks before my 16th birthday, on March 4, 2000.

Now, lest you think I was a spoiled princess who received a brand new car for her Sweet Sixteen, let me set your mind at ease. The car was not a birthday present. The reason I got it so close to my birthday is because I got my license on my birthday, and with the license came the accompanying car. I paid for precisely one half of the car. In fact, I was in debt until my sophomore year of college because of that car.

But basically, the reason I had a shiny new car was because my mother had an irrational fear of used cars. She always liked to say that used cars aren't reliable because you never know how the last owner treated them, which I suppose is true to an extent. Thus, she did not want her young, freshly-licensed daughter driving on the back roads of North Carolina in a car that could break at any moment.

When you're living in North Carolina, you more or less need a car. Everything is very far from everything else, and there is no public transportation to speak of. My parents fully supported the idea of me having a car, because they were really sick of having to drive me everywhere. This was made worse for them by the fact that my older sister had driven me everywhere for a year when she got her license, then gone away to college, forcing my parents to once again get up early to take me to school (no school bus), drive me to see friends, etc.

God, writing this is reminding me of how much it really sucks not to be able to get places on your own. This is why Torsten and I want to have kids in a city that has a real public transportation system.

Anyway, back on track. My mother did want me to have a car but did not want it to be a used car, which would have been the only option I could afford, so she offered to pay for half of a new car for me and to lend me the rest of the money that I needed to make up my half. And when she said half, she really meant it. Half of the cost of the car, half of the tax, half of the gas, half of the insurance. My mother was all about teaching her children financial responsibility, and she kept very good records.

By the time I turned 16, I had about $5,000 in savings (from babysitting and working as a salesclerk), and it took me four more years to pay off the rest of the car because every time I got close, it would be time to pay car tax or another insurance bill would come or something, and so it was with the biggest feeling of relief ever that I finally paid my mother my last installment and took the car to college with me. (I was not allowed to take the car away until I had paid it off. This was part of the lesson on financial responsibility. On the other hand, I was not charged any interest on the loaned money. This was a reasonable trade-off.)

The decision to get a New Beetle as opposed to any other car was not based on the fact that it's a cute car, but rather on the fact that it was one of the cheapest cars that Consumer Reports gave good reliability ratings to. Still, my mother was worried that I could get stranded somewhere, get out of the car to call her on a pay phone, and get attacked by a man who was loitering near the phone, just waiting for a young girl to stumble innocently upon it. So, she insisted that I get a car phone. This was before cell phones had really caught on. The cost of making a phone call on the car phone was about 60 cents per minute. Of this, I was expected to pay 25 cents, as that was what I would have paid for a call made on a pay phone (I presume you see what I mean about her insistence on lessons of financial responsibility).

Unfortunately, I do not have a picture of that stylish car phone, but suffice it to say that it took up more or less the entire glove compartment of the car and that the only thing the screen showed was the phone number you typed in, in giant orange numbers. It also had a classic blocky look to it. I never used it, even once.

It did have a good engine, but it had tons of electrical problems. The oxygen sensor kept breaking, which caused the car to smell like rotten eggs. The check engine light kept coming on for no reason at all (and no, it was not because I didn't know how to screw the gas cap back on). Sometimes the electric window buttons stopped working (this happened at a toll booth once, forcing me to get out of the car to pay the toll. That sucked). Sometimes the CD player stopped working. I'm pretty sure Consumer Reports doesn't give it top ratings anymore, at least not for wiring.

I did love the car, though. I drove that thing as far south as Orlando and as far north and east as Maine, although I don't think it ever went further west than Toronto. When I got back from my year in France, I was afraid to drive it, but it turned out that driving is pretty much like riding a bike. That car has been up and down I-95 more times than most people I know. That car was my first step toward liberation from my parents.

I sold it when I graduated college and moved to DC, after having had it for just over six years. I made a pretty decent amount of money from selling it, and that money helped me pay my deposits, move-in fees, and rent and support myself for a month until I got my first real paycheck. Now I use the Metro, the bus, and Zipcar. So I don't miss my car. And I definitely don't miss having to take it to get the check engine light turned off at least once a month.

But still. Wasn't it a pretty shade of blue? It looked purple in the sun.

Hooter

I consider my extended family to be fairly small, even though my dad was one of six children. He has three brothers and two sisters, but only one sibling has children, so I have only two cousins. My mother has one sister who does not have children. So I have three aunts and three uncles, except that one of my uncles, Michael, died of AIDS in 1994, when I was ten.

Although his death had a profound and lasting effect on me, and although I still miss him deeply to this day, and although he is the reason that I began working in public health to begin with, he himself is not exactly what I want to write about today. Instead, I want to write about his dog, who temporarily became my grandmother's dog after his death, and then eventually became my family's dog. His name was Hooter.

Michael had had Hooter for as long as I could remember--in reality I think since I was maybe four years old. He got him from an animal shelter, where his name had been Skeeter. My understanding is that Michael wanted to change the dog's name drastically, but it just didn't work, so he eventually picked the name Hooter because it sounded sort of like Skeeter and because Hooter really did hoot quite often. He was half beagle, half basset, and he had that classic basset bay that he issued most often when he wanted to go for a walk.

Michael always fed Hooter leftover food from his dinners the night before. The two of them would wake up late, like around noon, and share the leftovers between them. I don't know if Hooter ever ate dog food. He was definitely spoiled and also overweight. We used to play Stock Market with Michael, and we would always rub Hooter's ears and kiss them for luck before we rolled the dice. They were incredibly soft and silky, and so long.


After Michael died, my grandmother took Hooter in, even though my parents offered. My grandmother wasn't much of a dog person but I think she wanted Hooter because he reminded her of Michael--the same reason we all wanted him, I guess. But she couldn't deal with the baying, and the constant demands for walks, and the pickiness developed through years of spoiling. Plus, Hooter was lonely. He must have wondered what had happened to Michael, where he had gone. He must have felt abandoned. And he probably missed his people-food leftovers.

So when I was twelve, my family took Hooter at my grandmother's request. Another one of my uncles drove him down from my grandmother's house in upstate New York to DC, where my dad and I had driven up from North Carolina to meet him to pick up the dog. It was right after Hurricane Fran, and our house had been without power for several days at that point, and we were out of ice and it was impossible to buy more in the area, so we used the opportunity to buy several coolers full of ice bags from DC grocery stores. Then we drove home in our minivan, me sitting in the back with Hooter on a raggedy pink blanket that my uncle had brought with him.

We already had two dogs when we got Hooter, and so we were good about feeding him a consistent diet of dog food and trying to get his weight down a little bit. The other two dogs accepted him pretty quickly, but he never really got into playing with them--he was always just a little aloof, and he much preferred to lie on an ottoman that he quickly claimed as his own than to play tug-of-war with the others. He liked my dad and would often cuddle with him.


He also tried to run away every and any chance he got, and would return hours later, stomach bulging from all the garbage he had eaten, and puking every couple hours on the carpet. We had to put a child lock on the cabinet with the kitchen trash in it, so that he wouldn't nose it open and eat the leftovers. People food made his sensitive stomach angry, but he loved it and ate it at every opportunity. Once he ran away on a snow day that I had off from school, and I spent two hours hiking through the snow in boots and pajamas, following his delicate little footprints. I didn't find him, but he came home soon after I did.

We never played Stock Market after Michael died, so there was no more kissing Hooter's ears for luck, but we would still rub them a lot, and he loved it. When it was time for a walk, he would jump up and down and howl with excitement. He had a raggedy old collar, and we tried to replace it when we got him, but the first time he threw his head back to howl, the collar came flying off, because his neck was thicker than his head. So we had to stick with the old collar, which for some reason never came off. He was smaller than our other dogs, so we could pick him up, or hold him on our laps, which he would usually tolerate with a long-suffering look before eventually scrambling down and walking over to his ottoman with extreme dignity.


Though he was older than our other dogs, he outlived them both, so he was there when my parents got their new puppy. The day they brought the puppy home, he jumped on his back paws and rested his front paws on Hooter's back--a sign of dominance in the dog world, I think. The puppy was establishing his place as the alpha dog in the household, and I always felt that Hooter just didn't care enough to resist--he was old, and all he wanted to do was lie around and sleep. He and the puppy spent most of their time ignoring each other, and that was probably for the best.

Hooter died right after my freshman year in college, before I had come home for the summer. He was probably 15 or 16 years old. He had been tired, my parents said, and not eating much recently, and then they came home one night to find him lying peacefully on his ottoman, dead. It was the first dog we've had that did not die in pain and did not have to be put to sleep. He deserved it. It truly felt like his time to go--like he was exhausted, weary of still being alive, ready to go to sleep once and for all. I don't believe in an afterlife so I can't tell myself that he's with Michael again now. But it seems peaceful for him to be gone. He needed it, I think.

He was a beautiful dog, and a sweet dog. He was the dog that kids always liked, because he was gentle and approachable. He was long-enduring. He was Michael's mostly companion. They belong together. I wish they could be. I wish I could believe they were.