I have really moved!

And here, for the last and final time, is where I have moved to:

mollykay.tumblr.com

On having a bad imagination

My mom sent this picture to me last winter, when the power in her house went out after this terrible ice storm and she had to stay in a hotel for a few days. It was very, very cold outside and this swan was keeping warm by standing on a heating vent.

Just a few months later, though, this picture looks incredibly foreign. Snow seems like a ridiculous concept, and avoiding cold seems sort of absurd. When it comes to weather, I realized, I am sort of like a child who still hasn't quite reached the stage where they can conceptualize anything other than what they are experiencing right now. And right now it is very hot, and actually I can't quite imagine I will ever be cold again.

(Mostly I'm not blogging here any more, by the way, but at mollykay.tumblr.com. Oh and (Kevin) I found the RSS feed button—it's at the bottom of the page.)

I have moved!

I blog here now-------------------> mollykay.tumblr.com.

I guess that wasn't really so slow after all.

Hippiehampton, Take II*

I'm not sure of the occasion (May Day?) (and who needs an occasion for a drum circle!) but I can actually hear the drum circle from inside my house. I tend to like it when places so exactly fulfill my expectations of them, but my expectations of Northampton hippies are generally fairly not good, and my dislike of Northampton drum circles is far outweighing the pleasure I could otherwise derive from the situation. I guess to be honest I just really don't like drum circles in general, but to understand that you'd have to understand how many terrible ones I was subjected to as a younger person.

Which reminds me. One time, (a long time ago) my friend dated this guy (in Berkeley, of course) who was super soft spoken and really, really, really present at all times (not in a good way) and ACTUALLY ROUTINELY WORE HIS MOM'S YOGA PANTS. We still talk about this, sometimes, this friend and I. Usually just to affirm, one more time, that this is not a good look, people, not a good look at all. #thingsthatremindmeofcollegebutnotinagoodway.

*I posted this on my tumblr blog already, but then my friend (the one who dated the yoga dude) wanted to know how to add a comment, and honestly I have no idea. Presumably she wants to claim that she didn't really "date" this guy. To which I will add, preemptively, oh yes you did! But that's just a guess. Maybe she recently attended a really enjoyable drum circle and just wants to share. Either way, I am posting this here instead of figuring out how to add Disqus or whatever it is to tumblr because it is Saturday and I'd rather be outside instead of in front of my computer. Comment away girl-who-once-dated-guy-who-routinely-wore-his-mom's-yoga-pants!

Fumblr

I'm slowly going to start moving this blog over to tumblr. Which means you can now also find me at mollykay.tumblr.com. I feel a bit half-hearted about the whole thing, but at least no one will have to write my difficult-to-spell last name into the url anymore.

On a slightly unrelated note, we had this canvas bag that I got at the Tumblr Reads thing a little while ago that said "tumblr" on the front, but Matt changed it to read "fumblr." Now I can't stop thinking of it that way. Probably because if my website could be named mollykay.fumblr.com, I think that would make a lot more sense with who I am.

You can't do that to a jellyfish!

Some woman apparently spends a lot of time recording her husband talking in his sleep. Then she posts clips of what he says on the Internet. Here's the link. It might be my favorite thing ever.

I don't know how Kevin finds things like that (and this, which entertained me for longer than I should probably admit) but I am very grateful that he does.

Downhill from here

There are a lot of things I'm going to miss about our apartment when we leave. So instead I have been trying to focus on the negative. For example, I'm looking forward to no longer having a compost. Actually, scratch that. Composting is fine, but I am definitely looking forward to not having a compost bin in the yard that is filled with food sludge which gets covered with a layer of maggots inches thick in the summer because no one (we share it with another house) has ever bothered to add stuff like leaves and twigs that would make it turn back into dirt.

Also, I am looking forward to not having a wooden floor that, while charming, has small- to medium-size cracks between each of the slats, making cleaning extremely difficult. And I will enjoy having an oven that can actually be heated to a specific temperature, and a toilet that doesn't need to be jiggled after every flush.

None of that really matters, though. Secretly I think it's very possible that I could live the rest of my life without ever finding a place I like so much again.

Friday, April 23rd

At 7 pm I went to a Mexican restaurant to meet Matt. I was very early, so I sat at the bar, drinking a margarita and reading The Possessed, by Elif Batuman. Every few pages I'd find a passage I liked so much that I'd stop for a moment and put the book down to just think about how good it was. Like this one, which came after Batuman's explanation of how she ended up spending a summer teaching English in Hungary:

"Today this all strikes me as somehow typical of this way things happen, when you try to follow life. Events and places succeed one another like items on a shopping list. There may be interesting and moving experiences, but one thing is guaranteed: they won't naturally assume the shape of a wonderful book."

During these breaks I noticed that there was a basketball game on, that the woman next to me was wearing an incredibly low cut shirt, and that she could not ever seem to manage to pay attention to basketball—for some reason, she explained to her date, she finds it both mesmerizing and boring. And then I saw the fish. It was in a little round bowl filled with dirty water sitting on top of the soda jets. It wasn't moving and after a while I asked the bartender if maybe the fish was dead. "Oh no," he told me, and then he tapped the glass a few times. Sure enough it fluttered around for a moment before settling back to the bottom again. "We change the water every few days," he said. "He's just depressed."

This made sense to me. It strikes me as slightly barbaric, the way we keep fish in these tiny glass cages that they just circle through, again and again. My Dad tells me this endless circling doesn't bother fish, because they have no memory, but my dad keeps fish. One fish, actually, named Blackie, I think (there used to be two), who is grotesquely large for a goldfish, although you can't quite tell from this picture. He lives in a tank meant for a regular sized fish in my dad's kitchen, with only a piece of obsidian to keep him company. How could this kind of life not make a thing go insane?

Oh Northampton

It's so hard to know what to think about it. On the one hand there is this:
But there is also this:

I now understand this as an elaborate Internet joke

These days my Yahoo email account is mostly just a recipient for my junk mail, but I do consistently enjoy reading the featured dating advice on the home page. Yesterday's, for example, informed me that the things happy couples should talk about include their childhoods, current events, and their views on TV and movies. "Compared to politics and personal fears, entertainment might seem pretty shallow," the article explained, "but discussions about movies can fall into the 'deep' category if you focus on character motivations and plots rather than on, say, the cute leading actors."

I then clicked on another article that offered to help me learn if I'm ready to commit. The way to do this, apparently, is to ask one's partner a number of questions. For example, I should ask him if he envisions us growing old together.

As far as gauging the answer: "If your mate quips, 'How the heck do I know, that is a long way off' or 'I guess so,' neither answer should satisfy you. To suggest that you or your mate is uncertain of your eventual fate together -- or cannot envision those "golden" years as a couple -- should be a neon sign with bright red lights that flash, 'This may only be temporary.'"

Is it possible that there exist people for whom this information is illuminating? If so, where are these people, and how have they survived to dating age?

Growing up weird

Sometimes it really surprises me that even though Mirabelle appears to believe that Matt and I purposefully torture her by doing things like vacuuming and making her take showers (we would give her baths like a normal dog gets but we only have a shower—if she were human I'm sure this would be a strong point of contention in her teenage years), she still seems to like us pretty well.

Aquagirl

My first job was at this restaurant called The Black Dog. You have probably seen the t-shirts. They have a standing dog (a black one, obviously) in profile on the front and the restaurant name on the back. They got popular a long time ago, back when people liked to consume as conspicuously as possible—having a shirt from The Black Dog was a way of letting the world know you had been to Martha's Vineyard, which is an island with a bunch of fancy houses off the coast of Massachusetts. There are also a bunch of less fancy houses, one of which was owned by my grandparents, and this was I ended up in Martha's Vineyard for August the summer I was 15.

I was a dishwasher. The other dishwashers were Brazilian, and I still remember the Portuguese word for knife—faca—which I'm sure only stuck in my mind because it sounded dirty. I always worked the morning shift and would leave every day stinking of eggs, riding my bike back to the house because I couldn't drive yet. Pretty much everyone who worked there was ages older than me, except for one other kid who worked in the kitchen who I quickly developed a brooding crush on.

Eventually, one afternoon he invited me to go swimming at some spot he knew nearby—he lived on the island year round, and so knew places to go that I didn't. Once we got there and had stripped down to our bathing suits, he told me a few things about himself. He had been born with six fingers on both hands, he said, but the extra fingers were cut off as soon as he'd been born. He showed me his hands, and sure enough, there were strange little scars right next to his pinkies. He'd also been born with six toes on each foot, and he showed me his feet and I counted six toes on either side. And then he told me the part I've wondered about ever since. His sister, he said, had been born with gills.

I was not turned off by any of this information, it only made him more intriguing in my eyes, but it was near the end of the summer and we didn't hang out again after before I left. A few years later I ran into him on the ferry to the island. He was older, and had shed the gangly awkwardness of early adolescence. When I asked him what he was up to, he told me he had become a drug dealer, the biggest drug dealer on the island, in fact. Maybe it was true. Although it now occurs to me that if he really was, he probably wouldn't have been sharing his business with some girl he hardly knew who he ran into on the ferry. But I still wonder about those gills.

The impossible perfect life

The first thing I thought when I saw this picture (from this blog called Old Chum), was that if I lived in a house that looked like that, I couldn't imagine that anything could ever really be wrong. But then I realized the place I live right now is basically just like that house, and I certainly wouldn't say that nothing is ever wrong.
That blog is also where I found this picture, which I realized is a pretty much perfect representation of how the future feels to me at the moment. Have I mentioned that I'm moving back to New York? To do I'm not exactly sure what, and live I'm not sure where, and support myself I'm not exactly sure how? I feel a bit like I'm throwing everything all up in the air, and all I can do is hope it all lands with me when it comes back down.

Bachelorette weekend, night 2

Among other things, we went to see an Iron Maiden cover band playing at a brewery in Pennsylvania. Predictably, they were awesome.

Bad Hair

The Bed & Breakfast we all stayed at last night had a very special book in the sitting room. At first Liz thought it was called Dad Hair.
Which made sense for a while. Until we got to the ladies.

Bachelorette weekend night 1

We are at a dance club on the Lower East Side which is really just a basement with an uneven cement floor and some chandeliers dangling from the ceiling, which is low enough to touch. We have just arrived and some of us are sitting down at some banquettes in the back that are filled with other a bunch of other people's stuff. A few others are standing nearby, starting to dance and quickly shedding layers of clothing. Abruptly a girl slides down next to the bride-to-be.

"Hey," she says. She had been sitting there before we sat down. But actually she's sort of screaming because it's unbelievably loud. "You guys can sit here, but don't steal my stuff."

"Okay," my friend says. "But we're not really those kind of people. It's my bachelorette party."

"Oh my god!" the girl says (screams). She looks to be about twenty, and a few minutes later we saw her and some guy she's there with go into the bathroom together. "I am so, so happy for you. Seriously. That's amazing. Just remember, it's about the marriage not the wedding." She's been looking my friend right in the eye. "I'm so moved and excited for you. And I know this is totally New York, but seriously, still don't steal my stuff."

Two ways to be a genius

1. Was talking to a genius (!) (from the Apple store) and his Apple co-worker last night, sharing service industry stories. One time, a lady from Cambridge, England, came up to one of them who had a masters from Cambridge. He told her this. "What happened?" she asked.

2. I never saw anyone spit in someone's food. But I did have a co-worker who would "crop dust," which involved walking by a particularly obnoxious customer while unleashing a monster fart. He also stashed drugs in various clubs around the city, so as not to have to carry them around with him. He was sort of a genius, albeit in ways that might not serve him so well in the end.

I would be so much better off as an accountant

Today I did what is probably the singular most nerdy thing I do all year—I sat down with two pencils, some whiteout, and a calculator, and did my taxes. I started doing them a few years ago because I didn't want to pay someone to do what I imagined I could probably figure out myself, and even though it would be a stretch to describe what I do with taxes as having much to do with figuring anything out—the whole thing remains a massive bureaucratic mystery to me—I kept doing them because it turned out I really liked it. There are so few tasks in life that offer such clearly defined endpoints, and when I find one I stick with it.

This not to say that I do my taxes well. I certainly don't do them quickly. But gradually I've gotten a little better. This year things went smoothly enough, even though the instructions on the state forms were predictably ridiculous. "If Section B line 14 is greater than Section A line 6, subtract line 32 from 31 on Form 1 and place the result both on Section B line 8 and on Form 1 line 33." There really was one line just like that. Although I should probably point out that last year I thought things went smoothly enough too, but over the next few months the IRS informed me of not just one but three mistakes. I am sure people at the IRS hate people like me.

But however things turn out, I got through them, and a little over six hours later, I was signing things and addressing envelopes. Tomorrow I will send them off, and this will mark the first time in my whole life that my taxes have gotten done on time.

What to do after jumping in the river

I sort of feel like this is what it looks like to stare death in the face:

Today was sort of a bust

This is how unfocused my morning was.
Things got a little better in the afternoon, but only a little.