veni vidi vici

I closed down the thrice-blasted mall last night (I HATE the mall -- it seems my adolescent eschewance of shopping malls has been exacerbated over time by having once nearly lived in one working my bones to the bone when I first moved to South Bend), but I came away triumphant. I have my jewelry (necklace, earrings: Target. Ring, bracelets: Macy's). I have my bustiere (Target). I have my shoes (Macy's).

The end does not cover the journey of the means. I hit Target first, then scoured the mall looking tired and focused and slightly panicked, marching from store to store, then finally decided on Macy's half an hour before the mall closed.

Then I stayed up way too late winding down. My feet hurt and my brain was wired.

But I did it! Thank God. Nothing like waiting till the last minute...which, as I realized in college, I will always do until that system fails me. (Know thyself.)

Tonight: laundry and packing.

I'm still at work, procrastinating on going shopping. I need shoes, jewelry & appropriate undergarments (ones that you can't see under the dress) for my sister's wedding. I have only tonight to get them. I have put it off until now.

I elude the stereotype of women who love to shop for clothes. I'd rather wear into threadbare oblivion the ones I have and live in a bookstore, dressed in rags.

january in october

It's snowing in my freezer.

I have never had this happen before. I knew it was pretty cold in there, and I've been fiddling with the temperature controls in the fridge for the past couple of weeks, trying to bring it down to a less Arctic temperature, since everything in the fridge has been freezing and there are enough icicles hanging off the shelves to look like Christmas.

I figured I'd worked it all out. Until I opened the freezer yesterday and was greeted by a snowdrift.

It's not even ice crystals. It's real, honest-to-God SNOW. I packed a pot full of it, freezing my hands in the process, giggling at the thought that if I only had company, I could surprise them with a snowball fight.

But alack and alas, I was the only one home, and the cat would only have been frightened and upset if I'd chucked a chunk of powdered water at him.

So it's winter early in my house.

moving along the ground

Figuring a few things out, which I think is good. I've been feeling directionless -- not jobwise, but lifewise (because sometimes the two are different things). I think I have a few, not real answers, but suggestions, like signposts or a compass needle that I finally (but only maybe) understand how to read.

Also, life without the internet at home has been goading me back to a mental chowing down on books -- one can only watch so much TV on DVD, however excellent the shows. Oo and pushing me back toward writing. Very exciting.

There are parts of me that I feel like I'm getting back. It's a kind of...relief. An easing in the tension. And it makes the aloneness not matter as much.

Every once in awhile these lyrics run through my head:

Joy at the start
fear in the journey
joy in the coming home
A part of the heart
gets lost in the learning
somewhere along the road.

rag-and-bone shop

I’ve been dreaming, the last week, about all my grade school crushes.

Each night’s strange mini-movie features a different boy. In all of them we’re all grown up now but somehow still in high school, and trying to escape strange circumstances. Last night’s was truly bizarro: My best friend, my crush, and I were on a field trip with our classmates to an amusement park at the edge of the world (and I do mean edge – it was right on the brink of a cliff, like the Cliffs of Dover), and the main ride was this huge version of those ships that you get in and it swings up back and forth, higher and higher, until you fly all the way around the circle (the amusement park back home calls it the Pirate’s Ship); only the one in the dream didn’t have any seats. You held on by handlebars and relied on your strength to keep you from falling and flying out to sea before plunging to your death in the surf at the cliffs’ feet.

I fell. I died but I didn’t die. Sea gulls were involved. A huge storm came up and everyone was running and hiding – the storm was alive and personal and going after individuals with lightning bolts. Crush and I had this unspoken, intense sexual energy between us. Best friend wasn’t picking up on it; she liked him too and they had a history. We wound up back at her house somehow. Then we were lost in the iron streets of a sort of post-apocalyptic/futuristic Pittsburgh by a river. There were unfamiliar designs of automobiles and a wacked-out bridge that worked by artificial gravity where you kind of stuck to the sides (like Minority Report). We were skyborn, floating above the bridge and looking down on the city. We bought ice cream. I think there were hovercraft. I don’t remember what happened after that.

Beats being chased night after night by murderous persons unknown.

But why all these old crushes? It’s very weird. Seriously, a different one every night. And I haven’t thought about these guys at all in years. But suddenly they’re there, every facial detail, every angle of their bodies, the way their hair lies, things I didn’t know I remembered, but made older, too.

It makes me miss them, and miss high school, and wonder how they’re doing. I’m not accustomed to nostalgia. I hated high school and was terribly glad to leave it and start my real life. So it’s putting me in a pensive mood, and I’m not sure what to do with it. Maybe it’s merely my subconscious delving into the roots of my occasionally-surfacing loneliness, as none of those crushes were more than secret, cherished yearnings...and none of my subsequent attempts at relationships with possibly, actually interested men have ever panned out.

What a funhouse.

I laughed three times yesterday. Real laughs. Spontaneous ones. They felt like balloons being let into the sky, when the hand holding the string forgets what it's doing. Watching each one rise, I felt surprised, like I should look down at myself and figure out where it came from (my navel? my ribcage?). And they looked so pretty against the blue, I felt happy. And that surprised me too.

lost and found

When I came home from work yesterday Simon wasn't there to greet me at the door.

Now, this might not seem like much, but in Sarah-Simon world it's the equivalent of the sun failing to rise. My kitty is always there to greet me at the door. Always.

Maybe he's taking a nap, I thought. He'll be along in a second, as soon as he hears my footsteps.

Nope. I started to call him. He didn't come. In Sarah-Simon world his failing to come when I call is like the sun rising black. So then I started to worry. Someone had mown my lawn for me -- was it my landlord? Did he come into the house and somehow let Simon out? Did Simon get into the basement and crawl out through one of the glassless windows?

My calls became a little more frantic. I searched under the bed. I checked the bathroom. I glanced in the library. No kitty. My calls became desperate.

Then I forced myself to calm down, because I thought I'd heard a faint miaow. I called again, and heard it for certain -- somewhere in the house. I followed the noise into the library and he was definitely somewhere in the (tiny, tiny) room. But I couldn't see him. I kept calling.

And found him trapped behind one of the bookcases.

It was in the corner, balanced across the corner so that there was a little triangulation of space behind it. Simon was sounding pretty frantic himself by then, and terrified, but talking to him in soothing tones, I started pulling books off the shelf so I could move it, wondering all the time how on earth he got back there. There's no way in along the walls or the floor. My best guess was that he tried jumping on the top shelf from one of the other shelves, overshot himself, and fell down (six feet) to the floor behind the case.

I started wiggling the bookcase, and Simon started trying to get out. I was worried that he had hurt himself, and that I would accidentally wiggle the heavy case on a paw or tail. I said, "Look out!" -- one of my catch-phrases that he actually understands, whenever I say that in a certain tone of voice, he always moves out of the way -- and he retreated to the very back of the corner. I tugged and yanked until there was just enough space for a slinking cat and called him to come. He wormed his way out (talk about trust: He looked a little doubtful of the fit but came because I called him) and ran into the kitchen. I followed and loved him up and fed him dinner.

He wasn't hurt, just a little traumatized and clingy. I have no idea how long he'd been back there -- anywhere from five minutes to six hours, since I'd come home at lunch and left him wandering free.

Stupid cat. I told him, as I slumped into a chair, "You've had more brilliant moments...as in, any other moment in your life."

But he seemed relaxed by the end of the evening -- even did, for the first time since moving in to the new house, his Floppy Love Kitty routine where he flops on the floor and writhes around, as Mary O'Hara writes in Green Grass of Wyoming, "in an ecstasy of love."

So all's well that ends well -- as long as he tries no more bookshelf acrobatics.

old house

I learned the other day from my new next-door neighbor Gordon that some years back an eighty-one-year-old woman died of a heart attack in my bedroom.

Surprisingly, however, this doesn't creep me out. The house is perfectly at peace with itself, and the bedroom especially so. I've actually been sleeping better in the dead woman's room these past few nights than I have for the last six months at the apartment.

So I think she died at peace. Houses hold their own atmosphere, you know? There are houses that are difficult to live in, houses with strange histories of inhabitants who fought, or were unhappy; and there are houses that are delightful to live in, houses that have absorbed their previous tenants' lives and kept them well. This little house is one of the latter.

Funny thing -- a couple of weeks ago I was driving past the stretch of road where the house lies on my way to one of the Courts to file some papers, and that little stretch is so pretty, all wooded and green and sheltered, and I thought, Ohhhh I want to live here. And when someone told me about the house for rent and I went to check it out, there it was, right where I wanted to live, and something about it called me.

I think I'm going to be very happy here.

clerk

She wore a black sweatshirt that matched her heavy eyeliner and her hair, and kept her heart in her big darkbrown eyes. She struck you as the sort of girl you wouldn't really expect to see standing behind the counter at check-out; she seemed more naturally suited for park benches in old neighborhoods, milling about with friends in wide-legged jeans strung out on chains. One of her friends might have a guitar for playing moody music, and she'd be standing or sitting listening to the conversation around her, processing everything she heard with those eyes.

But there she was, ringing up the people ahead of me, and I noticed how she spoke to the customers: quietly and kindly, her voice pitched low, even-toned, her speech a little slow, thought-out. You noticed that she was really there, taking in the people, looking for their eyes, and I thought she had a singular gift of being present. It's something I'm not good at myself; I'm always in a hurry or lost in thought, never really quite here, living somewhere in my own head. I have to train my concentration on the world around me, on the moment of the here and now; but she already lived there. She had a kind of calm about her.

When my turn came, I stepped up with my arms full of milk and vegetables and set them down in front of her. She said hello in that slow, quiet voice, and as I fished around in my purse for my debit card, I felt her taking me in the same way she'd taken in the people before me. It's a strange sensation, being seen.

"That's an interesting T-shirt," she said in that same voice, a neutral sort of voice, but I heard a little pitch of concern underneath it.

I looked down, having forgotten what I was wearing. Oh yes. My deceptively cheerful, ironic, macabre bright red sweatshirt declaring in happy letters surrounded by rainbows and hearts, I Hate Myself and I Want to Die.

I smiled. "I think it's funny," I said. "All the hearts and rainbows."

And then I looked up at her, and saw in those fully present eyes that she was worried. She put on a little smile for my sake, and I was again surprised: At first glance, she's the kind of person I would have ordinarily marked down as someone who would be amused by the shirt.

I changed tacks. Still smiling, I said, "I don't wear it when I'm actually feeling that way."

She handed me my receipt and bagged my purchases, looking half skeptical, half relieved. "I'm glad," she said. "That might cause some concern for your loved ones."

I don't remember what I said to that. I thanked her as she handed me my groceries, wished her a wonderful day, and departed.

In a thoughtful mood. I've had a lot of reactions to that shirt: horror, disgust, anger, amusement, camaraderie, delight. Never that kind of open concern, especially not from a stranger.

It was a different experience. There aren't many times when you feel like you've come into contact, really met, the Other. And there are even fewer times when meeting the Other results in a realization of love. Even universal, impartial love.

I think I used to have that gift. Not of being present, but of noticing people. It's much less there with all my worries and absence from the here and now. I check out a lot. I'm brusque and concerned with my own affairs. But this girl, who looks to be a misfit in society, seems to love everyone in it -- not in a perky, chipper, irritating way, but in a considering way. And she takes the time to notice.

I wonder if she feels overwhelmed by it. By being present. That's why I leave the present so often -- it's immeasurably difficult to face other people's difficulties and heartaches and problems and panics all the time. She didn't seem afraid, though.

I usually walk into a grocery store with the intention of making my clerk's day a little better -- saying a cheerful hello, asking them how they're doing. But that day, she made mine. A single girl tends to feel a little invisible if she lives far from family. There's no one to notice if you're looking peaky, or if you're depressed; you have to declaim it outright in order for people to know. And even though I really was in a good mood that day, a stranger saw something and responded.

It was a beautiful gift.

forgetful jones

Anyone remember those skits from Sesame Street? The old, classic Sesame Street of our growing up years, I mean, not that mindless crap they put on now.

I got a call from my old landlord last night, who said, "I have something of yours that you probably really want...does Grove City College ring a bell?"

Yes, folks. I forgot my diploma.

I started laughing. The ONE THING I neglected to take with me was my college degree. I remembered everything else -- the curtain rods, the nails in the walls, even the drain trap from the bathtub. But I left my diploma.

Well, I always leave something behind on any trip I take, so why start making exceptions now? MP is kindly holding onto the proof of my BA in English until she returns from fall break.

And in the meantime, I have my study/library almost all set up (Joy! Rapture!). Boss-Man sent me home from work early yesterday to sleep, because I was the picture of Walking Death Exhaustion, and I woke up early this morning feeling rested. Still tired, but the muscles aren't as achey and I can do things like sit down and walk up stairs.

I think I might be able, for the first time since leaving home for college, to get up early and rediscover my inner morning person. I've been missing her. And a lot of joy is coming from the fact that I only have a three-minute drive to work now. That takes a lot of strain and rush out of my morning routine. Delightful.

And Simon is his cute kitty self. Out of all the boxes I have, he managed to dig out his catnip toy and bite holes all through the bag before I got home yesterday, which I found amusing: My cat is unpacked (and for himself) before I am.

On to work!

Greetings from Michigan

I am no longer a resident of South Bend. Or of the State of Indiana. (Insert Hallelujah Chorus here.)

Well, folks, I'm all moved in. It was a long and arduous weekend of packing, lifting, hauling, loading, and unloading, and of dragging furniture around in the new space, but I had plenty of amazing help with the heavy stuff on Saturday in the forms of Meg, Phillip, Pete, and a huge U-Haul (when did I get so much stuff? when?), and then yesterday I spent at the old apartment packing the rest of the things that there were neither time nor boxes for on Saturday, and yesterday evening I turned over my keys, paid the last of my dues, and made my old landlord sign a paper releasing me from the lease (having learned a thing or two in the course of my understudy as my lawyer's Secretary).

And then I was done.

I feel like I have a new lease on life (HAHAHAHAHAHA, I crack myself up). My new house is cute, small, cozy, and just about perfect for what I wanted. My yard is huge, both front and back, the neighborhood is barely a neighborhood, practically rural, and although the road itself is pretty well trafficked, the area is so beautifully quiet. And safe. I don't remember the last time a neighborhood felt safe. I actually left stuff on my porch yesterday and all night, and it was all there when I came back. There is no longer a shotgun under my bed. When I need something, I can jump in the car and drive the three minutes to town (like coffee in the morning -- I don't know where the French press went, so I've been climbing in the car in my pajamas to drive to McDonald's for my a.m. rejuvenation). It's the small town mentality -- something I haven't had since I moved away from North East.

And it's so amazingly wonderful to be the only person residing in the house. No footsteps, no loud conversations, no music, no TV leaking in through the walls. No sudden fluctuations in water temperature when I'm in the shower. No worries about my own noise. It's incredible.

Of course, that part is taking awhile to adjust to -- yesterday I would drop something on the floor and it would thud and I would automatically think, "Oh, I hope that doesn't bother...oh. The spiders." Because there's nobody underneath me. Hooray! And this morning in the shower I kept tensing, waiting for someone to flush a toilet, or run a kitchen sink...and then remembered that unless I could split myself in half or break all the laws of physics and be in two places at once, that wasn't going to happen. It's. all. mine.

My front porch is huge and great, with a nice enormous sloping overhanging roof, so no more getting wet when I step outside. The house is set far back from the road, so it's not an invasion of privacy to sit on my porch and enjoy the day.

Simon is adjusting much better than I had thought. Saturday he was confused and upset (and I had him in his crate for hours, who wouldn't be upset? but I didn't want him scooting out an open door); once I let him out, after the furniture was all moved in, he wandered among the castles of boxes and yowled pathetically and slunk about kind of afraid. But as soon as I started making the bed, he relaxed. He loves that bed. When I'm at work, he spends all of his time there napping and whatnot, and he shares it with me at night, so I imagine that for my kitty, bed = home. And so I'm guessing he figured out, Okay. She's making the bed. It smells like her and it smells like me. She's sleeping here. We're staying.

I still have so much to do. There are so many boxes that there's barely room to move around. I didn't realize how efficiently I had managed the limited space at the apartment so that the amount of stuff didn't appear to be extreme; but once it was all in boxes, I stood around looking at it going WTF? And now it's even worse because I have to dig through it all to find anything even remotely simple. And the rooms are smaller than my apartment, so there's less maneuverability.

But I have the skeletal structure of each room arranged (except the bedroom, I'm still feeling out the feng shui there), and it was delightful to eye my furniture and put out my feelers in the room and try to figure out what the room and the furniture were telling me about where they belonged. This is the great thing about houses -- if they're good houses, good living spaces, they talk to you. You work with the house to get everything organized. And your furniture helps out. It's kind of like tuning in to someone else's conversation, being a third party mediator between the space and the stuff. (Okay, the couch doesn't like being next to the writing desk, but the window is telling me that the writing desk belongs in front of it, so let's move the couch to the other corner of the room and see how the easy chair likes the corner by the writing desk. Oh yes. They're happy. Great.) So organic and lovely. I love arranging and decorating.

So my bookshelves are all beautifully arranged in my study, with the computer desk (which looks out the window, hurrah!); and the living room with the huge easy chair and loveseat and writing desk are in harmony; all of my curtains will work on my windows (SO. HAPPY. about that, I worked hard on those living room curtains); now I just have to negotiate all those damn boxes.

There are things I'm fretting about already -- I have to come by a lawnmower and a snowblower and a rake at some point in the near future, as well as change the tires on my car, and where do I have the funds for that? -- but God has provided so amply and QUICKLY for all of this, so I'm holding to hope and deciding not to panic until the first snowfall.

I'm exhausted beyond all reason, and every muscle in my body protests at my slightest movement, like my whole body is saying to my brain, "You want me to do what? Fine. I may have to respond to your electrical impulses sent along the nervous system, but I don't have to be happy about it." I'll be moving around like a little old lady for the next few days: I strained my knee and my back has a few choice things to say to me about its treatment and my feet are blistered and sore and Charlie horsing constantly and my shins are bruises from my ankles to my kneecaps.

But it was worth it. I have peace of mind, a quiet haven, and no more freaky neighbors. Or if they are freaky, they're distant.

And a study. Did I mention I have a study?

I'm quite satisfied. Even if I'll be living out of boxes for over a week.

Final Arrangements

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA.

I have so much to do.

I'm on hold right now getting all my utilities changed over. My boss has to look over my lease before I sign it. I need to finish inventing a document for my current landlord to sign so that the lease is officially terminated. I have to do a frick-ton of packing tonight and tomorrow before everything is ready to go. The cat threw up this morning. I'm exhausted but a walking bundle of nervous impatient energy.

I wish the auto-sales-voice on the hold line would SHUT. UP.

I'm going to try to get the afternoon off work to take care of all this stuff.

Why don't I have more beefy male friends?

Tired

Forty-six boxes packed. I'm still not completely finished, but I'm nearing the end.

So glad I'm getting out. At this point all the frustrations of my apartment house are becoming more amusing in the absurd sense than horrifying and stressful. Such as the other night when I was sitting on my porch and a drunk guy stumbled out of the downstairs apartment and took a piss in the bushes. Fun. No, wait, what? Oh yes. And then slurred an apology for not seeing me, and got into a car and drove away. I said a little prayer for all the drivers on the road with him on it. Unbelievable.

'S been a rough week at work again, and when things are rough I tend not to roll into bed and sleep the world away at the first opportunity, like I should; instead, I tend to escape into a book far later in the night than pragmatism would suggest is healthy, both for my body and my emotional wellbeing.

Oh well. I'm reading The Golden Compass, and I confess that, child of the information age that I am, I picked it up because I liked a trailer for the movie that I saw in the theater a few months back. But I'm liking it well so far, and it's a hard book to put down -- there's always something happening.

But today I'm tired, and not only did I sleep little, I slept unwell, and it's a raw rainy cold October day (which in itself is wonderful -- we've been having fricking 85 degree weather for the past two weeks and it's been driving me insane, autumn is supposed to be chilly, thank you) which only makes me want to sleep. Something about curling up in bed on a rainy day, right?

And my office is a disaster, and yesterday was one of those days where all my most recent mistakes came to light at once at work, and I caught them, and had to scramble for the rest of the day trying to correct them. *Sigh.*

So here's to gainful employment, and keeping on, and plowing through, and making things work because they have to.

progress report #2

Twenty-nine boxes packed. That includes all my books and movies (except for a few lying scattered about which I can use for my entertainment during the packing process), all my knick-knacks, most of my pictures, and most of my kitchen stuff.

The apartment is looking so...stripped. It's a little sad. I did love it here, until the circumstances became intolerable, but I've spent the past two and a half years making this apartment my home, and I'd made it nearly perfect.

But I'm excited about the future, and arranging the new house, and living SO CLOSE to work, and having my own private residence. So when I find myself feeling blue about leaving this little place that I've loved so much, I think about what's ahead, and get a nice glowy feeling.

And I can't lose my momentum now. There's still a ton to do -- pantry, containers, taking the crates down off the walls, closets, the stuff I have stored in the basement. Yargh.

Sarah is going to be one busy puppy these next few days.

But I did get plenty of rest this weekend, even with all the working and packing and newspaper wrapping involved. Lots of sleep at night, and luxurious naps during the days. Which I've needed.

And all shall be well...

progress report

Sixteen boxes packed. All my books and movies. (Yipes, there are a lot of them.)

I need to throw on some clothes and head out to the stores for more pathetic box begging, and to buy more packing tape, as I've just run out. Grr. The little things that hinder progress.

But I'm armed with plenty of newspaper, and will tackle the knick-knacks and pantry supplies when I return. Will also begin on the pictures decorating my walls, and take down the crates (marvelous thing about those is that they're their own boxes, and I can use them for packing, whoo-hoo.)

And just in case I needed confirmation that I'm doing the right thing...

Last night when I came home late from work there was a creepy stranger pacing the sidewalk in front of the porch, and as soon as I parked, still on the phone with my sis, he started pacing in front of my car. Of course I had all the doors locked already, and all my instincts were shouting do not get out of the car. He didn't go away, so I turned the car back on and left. (I did drive past your house, MP, but you weren't home.) Drove to Mishawaka and back, and by the time I returned, he was gone...

But the door at the bottom of the stairs was wide open, and the stairwell lights were off.

Now to a cop's daughter, that spells Bad Things. That smacks of break-in. So I went next door and asked the neighbor to walk up the stairs with me to make sure the apartment was all right. It was fine, I did a quick walk-through, all was secure, so I thanked her and she left. There was an argument going on in the apartment across the hall, which isn't unusual...but the hair stood up on the back of my neck when I realized that the voices weren't my neighbors'. They were snapping things like, "Hand me that," and "Give me that," and, "That goes right there."

I called the police. Then I called my landlord. They all arrived at the same time, and it turns out the people in Lu's apartment were friends of hers that were hanging out until she got back, since she'd lost her keys. Santos kicked them out anyway and told them they'd be arrested for trespassing if they returned.

When Lu got back I explained what had happened, and that I thought someone was robbing her place, and she was amused and touched and thanked me for being a good neighbor, so at least the scary people that live around here won't be pissed off at me for the remaining week I'm here.

But God. I told Santos, "I can't live like this anymore." He said it might be better if I got a roommate. (The nerve.) I said, "I'm not getting a roommate. I don't live well with people." He suggested I invest in a taser. I said, "I'll do better than that." He looked freaked out. Then he started talking about how he'll have to get a tenant to replace me who's just like me and will tell him what's going on around the house, and I had to choke back some choice words, because I'm still not out of my lease yet. GRRRRRRR.

Good confirmation, though. Not like I was having second thoughts or anything. I've been feeling nothing but relief at the idea of not living here anymore. Even maneuvering and arranging all my stuff in the tiny little house I'll be inhabiting sounds like fun compared to all this crap.

Another great thing about my new location is that I know all the cops in the town I work in, and get along with them quite well, and I'm on their beat. Nice little perk.

And oh, to have Michigan plates on my car. It will be SO NICE not to have Indiana ones. Why, you ask? Indiana drivers are idiots. Whenever I'm driving out of state and cruising like a bat out of hell I feel like I have an obligation to prove to the world that I'm not like most "Hoosiers" that would rather be seated in a buggy, and I feel like my plates come as a surprise when I pass people on the highway.

Michigan drivers, though -- they're insane. They're fast. They're fantastic. And they're EVERYWHERE. You can't drive in any other state without seeing someone from Michigan (or a pack of cars from Michigan) blasting their way along the highway like they had somewhere to be yesterday and time's a-wasting and they've never heard of a plane. And you wonder, What are you doing out here? It's not even a holiday weekend. And then you think, Damn. They're fast.

So it will be a relief to shed the Indiana veneer, the Hoosier reputation. I fell in love with Michigan a long while back, and it will be so lovely to live in my adopted home state. I'm Pennsylvania born and bred, down to the blood and bone, and that will never go away, but I love Michigan and it will be nice to call myself a Michigander.

And get rid of the stupid Indiana plates on my car.

in motion

On my way home last night I went to Wal-Mart for boxes and found to my dismay that they've done away with Layaway and therefore dispose of their extra boxes instantly. SAAAAAAD. But as I wandered forlornly about I noticed some empty boxes lying about, and then began begging. And the employees were terribly nice. Make that Terribly Nice. I ended up walking out with two cartsful of broken down boxes to begin my Moving Out Flurry.

So. I Came, I Saw, I Begged Shamelessly. And these big sparkling hazel eyes and wide appealing smile go a long way to further my cause. Yes, folks, I have no shame. "Hi...um...I'm moving really, really soon and I just found out today...the place I really want just came up and I got it and I'm so excited...but anyway, I have a lot of packing to do in like no time...d'you think I could have some of those boxes? Would you mind? Really? Thank you so much. I need them so desperately and I didn't know what I was going to do..." (The one lady I talked to who was working freight even dumped all her boxes out and broke them down for me while we chatted about the travails of moving. She was fantastic. She told me to walk around the store and check with anyone else who was working freight and help myself to any boxes I saw. Then it was like magic, people were going out of their way to help me and give me pointers, and the folks at the door were amazed at how I was maneuvering two carts at once and we laughed together and the one woman complimented me on the pearls I was wearing and a gentleman offered to help me walk them out to my car -- sometimes it's like you step on an invisible button and everything is on. I think people respond to happiness. And yesterday I was really, really happy. And today I still am. I was even on time to work this morning.)

So last night while watching Ella Enchanted and part of Young Frankenstein (that's "Frahnkensteen") I packed nine boxes of books. Now before you get all impressed, that's only the books in my living room, which isn't even half. Sigh. But a good start nonetheless. And I am going to be Busier than Busy this weekend Running My Ass Off to get things packed.

You really accumulate a lot of stuff in two and a half years.

I'm getting plenty of help though with my move date, and I plan to have EVERYTHING packed by the time the Big Day rolls around, so that Moving Day is only Moving Day, and not Packing-and-Moving Day, except for some of the bigger stuff I can't manage alone like computer and TV and whatnot.

You know one of the things I'm most excited about? It's so trivial it's hilarious. There are plenty of things I'm excited about -- my own backyard, my own front porch, my own house with no other tenants, no one else's music or TV coming up through my walls, no one else's footsteps, no one else's voice, my own basement (places to store things when I do canning next summer!), my own garage, a commute to work that's so short it's giddily laughable, new home improvement projects (yes, yes, I admit, my apartment has been so perfect it's gotten boring), the potential for gardening -- so many things I'm excited about.

But you know what has me just purely delighted?

Michigan plates on my car.

good things come...

I GOT THE HOUSE.

Yup. Got the house. Got out of current lease. Got new house.

And am moving in Next Weekend.

Um, holy fricking crap, I am going to be so fricking busy these next ten days.

All you readers out there who started praying, I owe you more gratitude and thanks than I can express. In forty-eight hours things have completely, and I mean completely, turned around. Unbelievable. Almost miraculous.

I will now be living three and a half minutes from work. I will have my own backyard.

I'm so relieved and, yes, shocked, that I came down with an instant migraine. Hahahahaha. Wouldn't you know it.

a lead

I have possibly found something. One of the guys at the sharpening place across the street from where I work told me about a cozy little rental house not far from work. It sounds idyllic. Small, yellow, quiet neighbors, great neighborhood, plowed in winter, decent yard, garage.

The folks who run the sharpening place -- well, they know everything and everyone in town. I talked to them about it on my way back from the post office this morning, and they know the owner, have been in the house, and they said it's great. Small, but great. They also offered to help me move.

I'm checking it out at lunch. Now if only it isn't too expensive...

honesty

All right, here's the scoop. The real scoop. The reason why I've been tired, and why my dreams are bad, and why every muscle in my back and shoulders and neck is wound tighter than the cover on a steel drum. It's not my job, and it's not relationships, and it's not loneliness, and it's not dishes.

It's my apartment situation.

I'm bad at talking about things that are really bad, okay? I don't like to do it. Call it pride, or stubbornness, or embarrassment, or a basic inability to ask for help, since I've been trained by a lifetime of taking care of other people to ask for nothing for myself, at least in the big big stuff, or some serious control issues that make me feel I have to have everything taken care of before I can mention it. Remember this past spring when I was starving because I couldn't afford anything but cereal and I lost twenty pounds and my skin was all pallid and all my joints hurt and my hair was falling out in clots but no one knew until it was over? Or did I forget to mention it here, even after the fact? And the whole time I knew there were people right around me, and all over the country, I could ask who would sell their livers to give me money if I needed it, and all I had to do was ask, but I wouldn't ask. And yes, they all yelled at me when they found out. But I had to do it on my own, right? I was in medical debt over the top of my aching head from the headaches the previous December and cat emergencies and whatnot, but by golly, I was going to do it myself. And I did, and then I promised I would never, ever do anything so stupid as live on cereal without telling anyone again.

Well, I didn't lie exactly, because I'm not starving, in fact I'm eating pretty well, but things have gotten bad again, not with money but with my apartment, and they got bad and I didn't tell anyone how bad and I've been drifting around in this spaced-out haze for months now and I guess it's time to break it loose and tell you, because the not-telling is starting to feel like hair falling out and clogging the drain in the shower.

You all know, if you've followed my blog for any length of time before this year, that my landlord SUCKS. He's the King of Sucky Landlords. He rules supreme in an unchallenged universe of sucky awful horrible lazy absentee greedy landlords. Before this summer it was kind of like a game, like a sneaky amusing game of chess, where I would shuffle my pawns and my bishops around to keep him distracted, and maybe throw a few impressive moves with my queen, and then wham slam the knight in around that beautiful L-shaped corner when he wasn't looking and trick him into being a good landlord, and then laugh up my sleeve at him when it worked and surprised the hell out of him and backed him into a corner of Having To Be a Good Landlord. I kept a little mental scorecard. Point me. Point him. Point me. Point him.

Like last winter when the three contributing tenants -- me, Jim, and Kevin -- knew he was going to try to cheat us out of our legal right to central heat in another frigid South Bend winter, and before it even got cold, we hatched a plan and one night we all gathered on the porch and Kevin called Santos and demanded that he come right away to see about a (legitimate) leak in his kitchen, and when Santos came, there (surprise!) all three of us were waiting for him, and I said, faux-casually, "While you're here, I thought we might talk about the heating situation for this winter," and the three of us bargained for sub-legal temperatures in our apartments and made him promise to keep the heat at 63 degrees, which he reluctantly did, and you could tell he hated it because he couldn't make one promise to one of us and then say something different to another of us because all three of us were sitting right there listening to him. And so for the rest of the winter I was the Heat Brigade, since I had a key to the basement where the thermostat is (what? why? I have no idea, that's the most idiotic place for a thermostat I can possibly imagine, but there you have it), and I would periodically go down and check it to make sure it was still set where he said it would be, since sometimes he would go down and lower it.

And that's just one example. Just one. I'm not going to elaborate on the three generations of people who briefly moved into the efficiency across the hall (and by three generations, I do mean three generations at once, and that included a two-year-old child), into a room the size of maybe your kitchen, if your kitchen isn't that big; or the three or four times I called the cops on the next couple who moved into the same efficiency because the man was beating hell out of the woman, and then I called Santos, but he wouldn't evict them, although that's turned out all right and now the woman is my friend, of sorts; or the time the three-hundred-pound icicle on the side of the house this spring fell and pulled away all the electrical wiring and when Santos stapled it back on the house he neglected to check that all of them were there and so missed the fact that the ground wire was GONE and ignored my multiple calls about surging and dimming electricity in every tenant's apartment for weeks in a hundred-year-old 60-amp house with all the original paper-wrapped wiring and so we had ungrounded electricity for a MONTH before he had someone check it out, once he decided I wasn't just a dumb girl confused about the workings of her freaking fuse box; or the time this summer when the guy across the hall KICKED IN the basement door where a bunch of my stuff is stored, and where a bunch of my stuff then went missing, and the upstairs neighbors were using a ladder from said basement up to their windows as a BACK DOOR when they locked themselves out and then left it there all day and all night for a week or so, so that anyone who wanted could have helped themselves to my windows too, until Kevin at my request hid the ladder in his apartment so that at least no one could just help themselves to it whenever they wanted, and the landlord, despite my many many many phone calls, took himself a MONTH to bother himself about that basement door and then when he did he didn't actually fix the broken jamb, he only padlocked it so that it's still only half-ass-fixed.

No, I'm not going to elaborate on any of that stuff. What I'm going to elaborate on is the stuff that really bothers me. And that's the downstairs neighbor.

Tracy is nice. She's quiet, her friends are quiet, her boyfriend is quiet. But I hate her son.

The very first time I met this shitty little son of a bitch he asked me my age, if I had kids, and if I had a boyfriend, and then told me he was available -- after informing me he had a criminal record and no job. Promising. He then proceeded to try to bum rides off me, which I refused to grant him. The moment he moved in with his mother, bad things started happening around the place, things we'd never had problems with before. Tracy's car got broken into. In our little back parking lot. The next-door neighbors had a break-in in their garage. My neighbors across the hall started seeing their bikes disappear off the back porch, even though they'd sold him one of theirs. The screen over the window where Slouchy (I started calling the worthless piece of trash Slouchy) stayed started disappearing, and I would hear Tracy come home and unlock her door and then demand in a startled voice, "How did you get in?" Garbage started littering the lawn, and I would watch Slouchy come home late at night and throw whatever he was holding in his hand -- pop bottles, Styrofoam containers, plastic bags -- into the yard.

He was creepy. I didn't like the way he looked at me. But his friends were even worse. I would sit on the porch at night for a few minutes of quiet before bedtime, and his friends would start showing up, and the way they eyed me sent the creeps crawling up my spine. I would hear them muttering about me through the windows, and then you bet I beat feet up to my apartment -- at my own house. Not to mention their pot parties when Tracy wasn't home. I had to shut my bedroom window some nights because the weed smell was so bad. They were loud. They were rude. They were mean-looking and horrible.

But then there's the part that's really the straw that's breaking the camel's back, and that's my downstairs doors. The one that's used has two locks on it now, I mentioned that awhile back. But the thing is, the fucking doorjamb is broken. Broken. Did I mention broken? The wood on the inside of the jamb is split like a bad tooth. One good shoulder shove and the whole thing would give way. I could break down that door, and I'm just a skinny white girl. I've been worried about that door for months, and for months I've been bugging the landlord to replace it. The wood is split, Santos, I said. He came and had someone drive a nail into it. A NAIL. Even I know that if you're going to try to hold two pieces of wood together, you need a screw, and believe me, I'd already tried, with screws three inches long, and it didn't work, so what the hell is a nail going to do? So of course it didn't hold, and the wood went back to coming right apart like tectonic plates in California, and when the plate that holds the deadbolt in place slipped -- because yeah, when he installed the deadbolt, he put the hole for it and the plate for the hole right OVER the split in the wood -- and I called him about that because then the deadbolt wouldn't lock, he just came and pulled off the plate so that the deadbolt could turn right into the bare hole. Great.

So it's been worrisome and scary enough, with a fucking thief and creepo downstairs with even creepo-ier friends who are always hanging around, and yes, I do sleep with a loaded shotgun under my bed, but not with the assumption that I'd ever have to use it, I was just thinking I was being kind of irrational, but then something happened about a month ago that made me think I WOULD have to use it and since then I've been kind of haywire, because I might be all gung-ho about the Second Amendment, and I might have made up my mind since childhood that I would use deadly force in self-defense if it were necessary (but only then), but I never had to face the actual possibility before and I never wanted to, because who wants to take a human life, and it really messed my head around because I shouldn't have to face that.

What happened was that my across-the-hall neighbor Lu forgets her keys a lot, and so when she's gone she tends to leave the downstairs door unlocked, which I hate and so I've talked to her about it before and complained up the wazoo to the landlord, to some teensy effect, but I can't control what she does after dark and I don't always hear her leaving so I can't always run down the stairs and lock the door after her. So one night about a month ago I was getting ready for bed in my bathroom, which is right next to the entrance to my apartment (weird setup, I know, but that's what you get in these charming old houses-turned-apartments, and despite all this crap I really do love my apartment itself), and I heard someone coming up the stairs and then there was this banging on my door. It's usually only Lu that does it, so I hollered, "Yeah?" before looking through the peephole, and then a ghetto man's voice I'd never heard before answered.

I went into instant terror mode and snapped, "Who are you looking for?" and they said, "Brian." "No one by that name lives here," I said sharply. "Check downstairs." And then I went to the peephole and saw a tall bald young mean-looking hood I didn't recognize standing in my stairwell and he started banging on Lu's door, only she wasn't home, and I could hear one or two other guys on the stairs behind the first guy. They pounded on the door for maybe a minute and I called, "You have the wrong door. Check downstairs." And he glared at my door, and then they sneaked back down the stairs, turned off the stairwell light, and closed the door very very quietly behind them.

I had my shotgun in my hands by then. I stood there with my ear to the door and listened -- the good thing about this old house is that it's very, very squeaky -- and didn't hear anything, so I quietly opened my door, slipped down the stairs in the dark, and popped the lock. This was before the deadbolt, and that lock was no real comfort, but it was better than nothing. My heart was pounding so hard I could barely breathe as I tiptoed back up the stairs and into my apartment and locked every lock I had and stood just inside the door, gripping my shotgun and listening.

And two minutes later I heard them trying to get back in. And I remembered that the day before I had seen three guys walking down the alley behind my house while I was talking on the phone on my porch, and they not only did a double-take, they actually walked a few steps backward to stare at me until I glared them into going away, and the guy I'd seen in the stairwell looked like one of them. I heard that door shaking in its jamb and I knew they were pushing very, very hard -- not quite the shoulder-shove it would take to break in, but they sounded pissed. And then they started pounding on the door. They pounded on that door for three minutes while I looked at the gun in my hands and realized that it might actually come to making a decision, right there, right then, that night, because my upstairs door might have been locked but I was only kidding myself if I thought it couldn't be kicked in, and there was no one else home, nobody I could shout to for help. And I squared my shoulders like the good cop's daughter that I am, and got ready.

But they went away. I listened for a long time. And then I went and put Patsy away and sat around shaking and I don't think the following haziness has really quite left me, and the dreams have gotten worse since then.

And when I called my landlord about it, he blew me off. I'm a single woman living alone, I had just had possibly the most terrifying experience of my life, he's an associate pastor at his church, and he blew me off. Then I really started getting spaced-out, and the dreams weren't just bad, they were nightmares, every single damn night, and the door hasn't been fixed.

Not only that, but things with Slouchy have gone downhill too. The other week I came home from work to hear him slamming his girlfriend against the wall in his room adjacent to the porch and her pleading and screaming, so I didn't even get to go inside after a really freaking long day at work before I had my phone out and was calling the police. I've gotten really good at calling the police and calmly giving them directions to which apartment is causing the problems. And the cherry on the whipped cream is that I was the only person home at the time, so he knows good and well just who called the cops on him.

And the Sunday before last I woke up from a nap and was heading out for dinner at Meg and Phillip's when I saw the porch swarming with cops all dusting for fingerprints and Tracy on the porch with her head in her hands and Slouchy and his creepiest friend there too and Tracy said she'd had a break-in. I talked to Lu about it later and said they were blaming it on the ex-girlfriend and Lu snorted eloquently and told me she's seen Slouchy climbing in through the windows. So this nasty worthless little piece of shit is stealing from his own mother, and if that's the case, who's safe? Because nothing's sacred to someone like that. So I called Santos about that, and he blew me off again, mumbled something about if things like that keep going on he'll talk to her about getting rid of the kid, blahblahblah. "Do you understand why I want that door fixed?" I said. Nothing.

Of course he's promised to get the door jamb replaced, and now there are two two-by-fours lying on the porch, but they've been there since last Thursday and now I think they're just a part of the ghetto decor, like the pop bottles and carryout containers and lunchboxes littering the yard. Not to mention that on Saturday, in a demonstration of the insecurity of the second downstairs door, the one that's never used and is only there for heaving furniture up the stairs, and is only held in place by a hook, Lu just YANKED it open from the outside and the hook gave like a candle being pulled out of a cake, so now that door is just ready and waiting for anyone who wants to climb up through it. I called Santos about that one right away, demanding a deadbolt on it, and he promised it would be done on Monday, and as of this morning, past the deadline, nothing had been done.

AND Slouchy is still living with his mom, despite all my faithful and irate reports about his behavior from what I've seen and what everyone else has seen. Even though Santos had called me on Saturday for help interpreting a legal notice he'd received that day telling him the cops had founds massive evidence of drug activity in the apartment when they were checking out the break-in (duh), and he'd better get it taken care of FAST or they'd sue him and fine his ass $2500 a day for each day it went unmanaged.

Lu's plumbing, which had been on the fritz since Saturday, though, that had been taken care of yesterday. Not my locks, however. I wasn't surprised, but I felt a little sick.

I don't think I sleep anymore. I think I just kind of lose consciousness. My muscles hunch themselves in bed, so that when I wake up I feel like someone's been rolling them up tight with a crank.

The thing is, I'm under lease, and in Indiana the laws are designed to protect landlords, not tenants. So I feel trapped.

And it's driving me slowly crazy. I need my peace, I need my rest, I need my home to be a sanctuary, a place where I can leave all my stress behind, I shouldn't be glad to come to work because I feel safer there. I have nowhere to recharge my batteries, I spend every waking and sleeping moment jumping at shadows, and I'm just...exhausted. Utterly and thoroughly drained and exhausted. My only insurance that I'm not going to get hurt by someone is scary ghetto Lu, who calls me her Rainbow and warns everyone that comes around to leave me the fuck alone or they'll answer to her. Because my Pastor Landlord doesn't give the littlest molecule of the tiniest hair of a dead rat's ass about my safety.

It's bad, folks. It's really, really, horribly, terribly, creepily, stress-beyond-all-imaginingly bad. If it weren't for Simon sleeping on my bed again at night I don't think I'd have any sanity left. I don't remember what a good night's sleep feels like. I don't remember feeling safe at home. I don't remember a time when every muscle in my body didn't make my bones ache with how tightly drawn they are.

I want out.

There. Now you know. I've told you before it was over and something's been done about it. I'm writing a long, strongly worded letter to Pastor Landlord. I'm going to figure this out. And I'm going to get the hell out of here. Because I really, truly, seriously, can't take this anymore. I can't live like this. It's worse than starving on cereal.

Please, please pray for me. Or if you don't go in for that, do something else -- focus positive energy in my direction, or whatever. That counts as prayer to me too. Or if you happen to see me, give me a hug. I'll probably burst into tears on your shoulder, but if you don't mind that, it might help.

So there's some honesty.