bing bang boom

1. I am the Unapologetic Geek (But I Still Laugh at Myself)

So I read Twilight in one sitting last night. I got absolutely no sleep, and I'm sure the circles under my eyes this morning rivaled those of any vampire, but even so, I woke up feeling alert and really great. Getting lost in a story heals me. Story heals me. I have always regarded my books as friends, not as mere vehicles for escape, and friends comfort, soothe, humor, encourage, entertain, share, and sustain. I have missed the burning popularity of the Harry Potter books, and I'm delighted to be a late-coming hop-on to yet another bandwagon book feeding frenzy. I don't subscribe to such an event often, and I like hovering on the outskirts of the buzz, the high, the mayhem, the shared obsession, the wide eyes and high voices as fans squeal and gush together, incoherent, unified by insanity, in love with literature.

Of course I have a long-standing yearning for good vampire fiction; paranormal lit seems to be growing at an astronomical rate, and I plan to ponder the social implications of the phenomenon later; but for the most part, the subject, while inspiring and creepy, generates terrible fiction -- lousy ideas, poor execution, deplorable writing. Bad all around. (Two shining exceptions: Sunshine by Robin McKinley, my favorite book of all time; and The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova.)

But Twilight wasn't bad. And while vampires have a strong macabre appeal generally, what I like most about the well-developed ones is their amazing vocabulary, their dextrous, intelligent syntax. Gorgeous, immortal, fast and strong, yeah, that's all well and good, very nice...but the vocabulary. When a guy knows how to use language, it's just....um. Very, very attractive. (Very.)

So, I'm a complete and utter dork. I embrace this. A girl can't help the way she's wired; and besides, it's funny. Today at work I helped a woman pick out dictionaries for all her grandkids, and regaled her with stories of how in my grade school days the assignments that took me the longest were my vocab lessons, because I spent hours reading the dictionary, pop-corning from one entry to the next, distracted and seduced by the guide words at the top of the pages. I had to break off my stories because when I pointed to the mammoth unabridged Websters on the top shelf and began an animated love story focusing on my own unabridged dictionary printed the year I was born, I saw that I was starting to scare her.

I really love that dictionary. Aside from containing a lot of words and the power to kill someone with a well-aimed fall, it has glorious etymologies.

2. My Lungs Thank David Sedaris

I read When You are Engulfed in Flames earlier this year, and "The Smoking Section" grabbed me. All of his books detail how much he has loved smoking, and I felt a deep and loyal affinity for this man who stubbornly went against society's norms and realized that some vices are better than their alternatives. So when I started this essay and read of his determination to quit smoking, I took it like a blow to the stomach. No, David! I thought, panicky, If you quit I might have to, because I smoke for similar reasons! You were my last justification!

His most striking method for quitting: move to Tokyo. I wasn't about to hop the ocean to give up a beloved habit, but the thought still lingered in my fumigated brain: Moving is a quitting trick. Hm.

Moving back to PA coincided with a desire to quit smoking -- a desire that hit me suddenly, unexpectedly, irrationally, and hard. The reversal was weird. I tried to go with it, but, lonely and miserable as I'd become accustomed to having my days be, the going was rough. I improved, but I didn't really quit. Not until I moved back home, where I had no associations with the habit. Nothing in town, anywhere in town, shouted, You used to smoke here! because I hadn't smoked anywhere, around here.

It helped. I broke the habit. But I still struggled with cravings, until a couple of weeks ago, forty-four-ish days after quitting, when, in a fit of rebellion, I bought my own special brand (Camel Lights) during a Girls' Night Out, and lit up.

I was shocked. It was disgusting. I hated it. I stared at the burning thing in my hand, wondering how I'd ever enjoyed it. My companions didn't smoke, so I was all alone outside, in the falling snow, undergoing a complete mental renovation. The practice held no appeal any longer. I didn't want to smoke. It was completely, utterly, and abjectly gross.

Since then I haven't wanted one. Not during the stressful moments at work, not during the lonely moments at the trailer, not during the depressed moments. I've lost track of how many days it's been since I quit. It doesn't matter. I think a key aspect of the transformation was making it public -- had I huffed and puffed in secret, it might have held more sway. But even as I slapped the pack against my palm and fumbled to ignite the lighter with my numb fingers, with G. and B. sitting inside, knowing, slightly disapproving, but accepting, I was horribly ashamed of myself. Not the kind of shame that makes a person crawl back into the nasty hole and keep doing whatever it was he or she was doing, helplessly, secretly, compulsively; the good healthy shame, as if something had materialized in the air next to me with its fists on its hips and was looking sternly at my soul and saying, What are you doing? You decided. Knock it off already! and my soul said...Oh. Yeah. What am I doing? And then I didn't want to do it anymore.

And this, ladies and gentleman, is another reason why we're supposed to live in community, and not in isolation. We bear each other up, and keep each other straight. G. and B., I'm grateful.

I'm grateful to David, too. And I advocate moving as an excellent quitting strategy. It takes most of the power out of the cravings, because the force of habit has a harder time getting its bearings, and instead of raging and roaring, it mewls and nags. Mewling and nagging are annoying, and easier to ignore.

3. O My Prophetic Soul

I knew I should have taken the Bayfront. I knew it.

I thought this to myself a second after the car slammed into the cement barrier separating the left lane of eastbound I-90 from the dropoff of the overpass. The back of my head throbbed and my heart felt weird and the shakiness struck almost at once, but I shut off the tear valve and took a few deep breaths before scrambling for the interior light and the four-ways. My parents' Toyota had wrenched to a whirling halt and now sat facing oncoming traffic.

It was dark, between eight and nine o'clock, snowy, freezing, wet. I had been on my way home from work, exhausted and hungry, and I'd elected to take 90 because the car needed gas, the only gas stations in Millcreek are on Peach Street, and 90 is a lot closer to Peach; getting back to the Bayfront meant doubling back and losing time, and I was sick of traffic, slightly misanthropic, and I just wanted to get home to read New Moon. As I passed one of the on-ramps halfway home the black ice claimed my traction before I had time to react; all I could do, spinning out at fifty-five miles an hour, was aim for the barrier and brace myself for the impact.

I was still all in one piece. I knew I should have taken the Bayfront. I'd ignored a fleeting bad feeling about 90 in the snow and bad weather; my intuition about road conditions is always spot-on, but apparently I'm still young enough to dismiss prudence in favor of the breezy conviction that It Won't Happen to Me. I clenched my fists, shoving any thoughts harshly to the back of my mind that might augment shock and lead to panic, such as how miraculous it was that I'd landed up on the rocks hogging the left lane just at the spot where the on-ramp made an extra lane so that traffic could flow around me. I was alone, nobody was stopping (and I'd have probably sent them away if they did); I could only rely on myself, and I had to rely on myself to keep calm. The car had stalled out when the concrete stopped it in fifth gear with my foot off the clutch; I couldn't remember where the car had struck, but the first thing I needed to do was see if the car would start.

It did. Throwing it in neutral and locking the emergency brake, I stepped out of the car to survey the severity of the collision. The huge bank of snow shoved up against the concrete had muffled my impact, and it didn't look as though the car were much damaged. I looked over the roof and saw, about a foot from where I'd settled, a long clean scrape where the concrete had been slashed free of snow. About twenty feet further down was another. The rear right of the car had taken the impact both times.

The wind was horrible, the temperature bitter, so I climbed back into the car, eased it into first, kept the four-ways and the interior light on, and watched for an opening in traffic. When it came, I eased the Toyota into first and drove it off the snowbank and back onto the road.

The gears all worked fine, but suddenly it totally, completely, miserably sucked that nobody knew, and I decided to pull over to give the car a more thorough going-over in a safer place, and call my parents. After I'd put on the four-ways yet again, I reached for my phone, and couldn't find it. The force of the collision had yanked it free of the charger, and it had disappeared.

The first thing that went through my mind was the answer to an old argument I'd had with my sister, about why I should keep important phone numbers in a non-phone-contact-list place, in case I were ever in a car accident and died, and my family needed to notify my friends. Um, they'd find your cell phone, she'd said. You don't know that, I'd replied. What if it got totally smashed up in the crash? What if all these people suddenly thought I didn't care about them anymore and that's why I wasn't calling, when in reality I was dead? (Hey, I'm a Virgo. I plan for every contingency.) Whatever, she answered. But now, scrabbling around in the front seat, on the floor, between the seats and the console, I thought, Ha! You can't rely on cell phones. Nyah.

Then, still unable to find it, thinking that now nobody knew I was alive, that I'd had any other reason to be otherwise, I felt the panic coming on (that phone has been the only thing linking me to humanity for over a year), and to keep it quelled -- since if I'd been able to call someone I would have been able to turn it into a joke and find the funny in the situation -- I turned off the car, kept on the four-ways, locked it up, and ran back the hundred yards or so to the accident scene, dodging traffic, knowing I was being terribly, unforgiveably stupid, but unable to stop thinking that the phone had flown into my lap in the collision and I had knocked it to the ground when I got out of the car. I needed to move. And I needed that phone.

It wasn't at the scene; I did recover a hubcap. I jogged back to the car, lungs hurting, and got back in and turned it back on for the heat. I didn't know what to do. I couldn't leave without my cell phone; I don't know anyone's number by heart anymore. I fixated on that to stop thinking about the even scarier fact that had gusted over me on my jog, watching the steadiness of traffic -- there hadn't been any other car on the road when I spun out. There could have been.

And then I looked up in my rearview, and, joy of joys, I saw the whirling red and blue of a lightbar pulling up behind me. Cops! I thought, giddy with not being alone anymore, relaxing instantly into the comfortable familiary of my childhood: I'm safe, everything is taken care of, he'll help me. I slowly opened the door and got out, huddled against the side of the car, restraining myself from dashing headlong to the cruiser and throwing myself at the officer only by the knowledge that he'd shoot me if I rushed him. I shivered and waited for him to decide I wasn't a threat, staring pleadingly into his headlights.

He was young, square-jawed, nice. He asked if anyone else were involved, took the report, invited me to sit in the back of the cruiser while he took down the insurance, registration, drivers licence. I leaned the aching back of my head against the headrest and closed my eyes, answered his questions.

When he let me out of the car and handed my information back and wished me well, and I said helplessly, "I can't find my phone. I need to call my parents...I'll just keep looking for it," he thought for a second and offered me the use of his cell. He let me back into his car, I dialed my mom's number, it went to voicemail. He heard it, said, "Voicemail?" "Yeah, but she'll call back and then I'll hear my phone ring," I said. He asked, "D'you want me to just call your phone?"

That had struck me as the most logical, though the most presumptuous step as soon as I'd seen the lightbar in my rearview, and I said, "Oh, that would be great, thank you so much!" and he let me out of the car again and I went back to the Toyota and stuck my head in the door, heard the phone, threw myself on my knees in the slush and dug it out from under the seat, rose jubilant, thanking him for his trouble. He wished me well again, said he'd wait till I pulled out, I got back in the car, eased into traffic, was on my way.

I took an early exit; the black ice was omnipresent. As I guided the car -- running smoothly and with only a dent in the rear panel -- slowly down the long road that descends from The Hill, I laughed suddenly to myself, thinking that I'd managed to give a state trooper my number. All I wanted was for him to help me find my phone.

I kept the phone in my lap the whole way home.

I also decided to wait till tomorrow to unleash this particular story on my parents. By then it will be funny and I can perform all the proper reassurances, and figure out how to help them replace the rear panel. Tonight I'm just grateful that something which could have been truly horrible was instead pretty anticlimactic and nondescript, rendering my delayed panic and shock rather silly. (Though I maintain that my guardian angel must be very tired -- while this is my first accident in which I was the driver who lost control, I've been in plenty others -- and I hope that when I float in through the pearly gates, he gets a vacation. I'll take him to lunch, whatever angels eat.)

The aches and pains are creeping in. My body is going to hate me tomorrow.