Something unlikely happened: my camera was recovered at a pawn shop. Apparently the bored-sounding police officer actually wrote down the serial number I gave her over the phone last Tuesday. Despite the fact that whenever we spoke the police could never remember anything about my case, somebody put the number on the appropriate list, the pawn shop owner made the appropriate call, and I was notified. People did their jobs! Hm.
After work today, I drove to the police substation to pick up my camera. While I was waiting for the cop on my case to arrive, I sat on the curb and ate a scoop of ice cream. I never buy scoops of ice cream, and I'm rarely in a good mood when I am in the Wal-Mart parking lot and/or I'm about to interact with the police, but today was an exception.
Two officers arrived and one simply stated, "Lisa." "Yes," I answered, and that was all that was said until we had walked through the building to the sparsely decorated back room, where there were three metal desks and one man for each.
My officer didn't seem to have much of a sense of humor. While I was waiting for him to fill out some paper work, I found out the pawn shop did actually pay for the camera and doesn't get any money back until the case is tried in court. I reminded him about the $100 exchange with my vigilante father (which he had never heard about), and now my dad can look forward to sifting through mug shots in the coming week. The officer took a Polaroid picture of my camera, and I mumbled something about it being ironic, taking a picture of a camera, and he said seriously, "It's for court evidence." I asked if the guy who pawned my camera was in custody, and he answered, "Not yet."
And that was it. I have my camera back, though the Bubblesoap sticker has been scraped off the back and the camera case was missing. Oddly enough, my film was still inside it. I'm excited about getting the roll back—I wonder if the thief took any pictures with it? I mean, he answered the stolen cell phone, why wouldn't he make a self-portrait?
When I was young, I used to enjoy telling my friends that my mom punched a boy when she was little and that she'd spent some time in jail. Only the first of those is true, but I had proof of the second. Of course, the uncritical eyes of my young friends did not recognize how obviously fake my proof was; actually, it wasn't until today, when I saw the picture for the first time in years, that I ever noticed that fact myself. She's the one in the middle.
***
Last night The Faint played virtually the same set as the last time I saw them; they even played the same cover again. One of the guitarists had changed his hair, though, so that was different. And I guess it was more crowded, because this time I couldn't seem to keep the two inches directly in front of me free from bouncing strangers. It was still a good show, and many people did their part in terms of creating atmosphere, by wearing all black of course. Including me.
***
Incidentally, today this weblog is one year old.
Tried to dye the red streaks in my hair blue, careful to completely cover the red so that my hair wouldn't be mistaken as a show of patriotism. However, all of it is completely black; only parts of my scalp are blue. My mother will be relieved.
—All day on Saturday, the frat boys down the street drank and whoo!ed and played The Devil Went Down to Georgia at full volume.
—The woman at the thrift store accepted the things I donated without the slightest hint of thanks. I mean, presumably she's going to make money off of it, right?
—So far I haven't found my camera in any of the pawn shops. I learned right away not to mention "stolen camera" to anyone I spoke with on the phone. I'm not sure what I'm going to do if I find it anyway. Buy it back?
—Martin and I drove through a poor black neighborhood on the way to recycle magazines and newspaper and I heard a woman yell, "What are y'all doin over here?"
—At the recycling bins, there was a giant pile of boxes lazily built beside the trash dumpster, five feet from the cardboard-eating bin.
—One of the guys who lives in the apartment beneath me plays the same practice riff on his bass guitar over and over again, every day. He doesn't vary it, and he doesn't seem to improve, really. Today was no exception. I've decided that I'm going to learn the riff myself, plug my bass into my amplifier, and play it back to him. I wonder what he'll do.
—Went out last night, only to question some of my friendships and wonder about people whom I didn't even run into. I think I'm partly to blame, because I was already feeling rather bad before I got there.
On Saturday, April 27th, 2002, people sucked. And I didn't even read the news yesterday.
I came home by midnight and sat up and watched Deliverance for the first time. At the end of the movie, when I stopped the tape, I caught the end of a commercial that said, "North Carolina: Discover the state you live in." If only Deliverance had been about backwoods North Carolina, instead of backwoods Georgia.
The bartender looked barely twenty, wore delicate heels and a tight skirt with a split up the side. When she spoke, she held her face at an angle so that she had to look up at you, her smile almost pointing at the floor. Now last time I took a check I got in trouble, but if you're sure it's good, I'll let you do it...you just have to promise me you won't get me in trouble, she said in a soft accent. My name's Megan. She looked like the type who puts her hand on your arm when you speak to her. I liked her immediately.
When the jukebox ate my quarters, she gave me a dollar bill and told me to try again. If you just tell me what song it was, I might be able to tell you the number, she said as I pressed the delayed arrow button on the machine. I've worked here for a little while, you know. Just after she walked off I found the first song again—Psycho Killer by the Talking Heads. 4-8-0-1. Almost as soon as I pressed the final digit, I heard the first few notes of music blare out of the speakers. But instead of the Talking Heads, I heard a twangy-voiced man wail, "ain't nothin wrong with bein a redneck..." She ran back over with another dollar, explaining that I'd chosen the only album they didn't actually have. Try again.
In the back, old men playing poker at card tables with empty Budweiser cans, cigarettes hanging out of their mouths, folded-over Jokers littering the floor. A man put in a Jimmy Buffet song and danced with a plump woman wearing overalls and sang to her about four lonely days in a brown LA haze, his arm wrapped around her waist. A golden retriever panted under one of the pool tables next to where I was playing. Richard Petty watched all of us with a grin on his face from several spots on the wall, always from behind dark glasses.
I think Michael's got me beat. He lives in a "nicer" neighborhood than I do, and a few days ago, a cab driver got stabbed in front of his house and left blood all over his front porch. (Apparently the cab driver is fine.) You'd think that with all of the crime I've been hearing about lately, that I would at least have some of the core benefits of living in a city. But you'd be wrong about that.
Ginna's in town for a couple of days, here to pick up her car and take it to Alaska with her. Had things worked out better, I'd be helping her drive it across the country, visiting friends in Chicago and Seattle, adding a state to the list, watching the land swell and straighten underneath the tires. I think it'd be good for me to get out of here and to find that reset button, which I suspect is hiding somewhere in the middle of Nebraska.
A few of the things I'm happy to have back.
***
Three of the friendly neighbors from the hippie house came by tonight with the following information: one of their VW vans has been broken into three times this week, the neighbors across the street had their car stolen, and there is definitely a man living in the crawl space beneath my house.
This isn't the first time something's been stolen, and that's not the first man who's made himself at home next to the water heater. In fact, the first year I lived here a man actually walked in my house and into my room and asked me for money. But those things have been rare, spaced out, unusual. I've always been on guard but felt relatively safe. I want to be able to live in a lower class community and feel safe. I don't want an apartment complex or a pool or white walls and beige carpet. But I also want to keep my car from getting stolen.
So far the plan is to use the club, carry my CD player inside whenever my car is parked at home, and to leave a note for the man downstairs, to warn him of coming locks so that he can collect his things.
I'm trying to remember everything that was in there, one item at a time: my driver's license. Thirty bucks. My ATM card, teacher ID, student ID, Ingo's old Berlin ID. My address book and phone numbers, my only copy of either. My check book. My cell phone. My passport, pages of smeared airport stamps and work visas. My Elph camera. The keys to my house, my car, my bike lock. My Swiss army knife.
I'd gone to play tennis with Richard and Martin. We'd locked Richard's van, and the moment I heard to locks click, I wondered why the hell I'd brought that thing along anyway. It's all gone now. It's been a little over two hours, and I've only started to make the necessary phone calls, including one to my cell phone, which didn't tell me much. I half-expected someone to answer, like on that Seinfeld episode, when Jerry's car was stolen and he called his car phone and chatted with the thief.
Martin's busy changing the locks on the house, since my address and my keys were in my bag. It only happened two blocks from here, after all. I keep looking out the window to see whether my car's still there. So far it is. In a moment, I'm going back to check dumpsters, to kick dumpsters, and to scour the area in the dark.
UPDATE:
My parents are crazy, I think, but in a good way. While I was out, searching for my bag in the park and along the tracks with a dim flashlight, my parents were busy calling my cell phone so that I might hear it and locate what was left of my things. Instead, the thieves answered, just like on Seinfeld. My dad offered them $100 for the bag and its contents, and my parents drove to Raleigh to make the exchange outside a nearby convenient store.
No money left, no ATM card, no bag, no Swiss army knife, and no camera, just my IDs, address book, keys, cell phone, check book, and passport in a plastic bag full of cigarette butts. They admitted to making a few calls and to feeling guilty about "messing with" a teacher and a student (neither of which I am at the moment, but OK) and pretended to be the third party that had retrieved the bag from a rebellious nephew. They tried to con my dad out of more money, but he maintained his initial offer of $100. I'm disappointed to have missed out on that meeting. I'm really impressed.
My parents came by and dropped off my things, and my dad laughed about his encounter, his shaking hands and introducing himself to a car full of people who'd stolen his daughter's things. My parents turned around and headed for home at 1:30 a.m.
The return of a large percentage of my things is making the loss of $130 and camera easier to take.
It used to be that I could tell who sold my name. In high school, I was briefly a member of a music club, the kind that gives you an advance of 10 CDs but obligates you to buy 15 more. To them, I was Lisa Winterman. I never lied about my name; they just got it wrong. During the first few years of college, Lisa Winterman got a lot of mail. She never bought much, though, so the campaign wasn't cost-efficient, and Lisa Winterman was left alone.
Lisa Whiteman, on the other hand, still gets lots of mail she doesn't want. She doesn't buy a lot either, but I guess since she actually exists, her name is recycled and passed around a bit more; perhaps it is written on a bathroom stall at the giant marketing headquarters in the sky. Whoever designed her profile, though, should look for other work.
In the kitchen, currently buried in a pile of glossy paper filled with unnaturally good-looking couples having lots of fun, is a catalog designed for someone who has a lot of money but doesn't know what to do with it. The catalog's main strategy seems to be to take an ordinary object, add the buyer's initials to it, and then charge three times as much for it. A monogrammed robe and slipper set for $125. Three tiny smelly pillows tied together with a ribbon for $36. A volcanic rock sachet for $65. A monogrammed silver-plated computer mouse.
The captions are nauseating: "For the woman who tends to carry the weight of the world on her shoulders, we've found the perfect contradiction."; "These days it's not just celebrities who have cameos."; "If she's going to wear your heart around your neck, shouldn't it be filled with diamonds?"; "Moms (and Miss Manners) know that a lady always has a hanky handy."
I should've done this earlier.
Foregoing the last run-through of the house, to make sure I didn't forget anything. Remembering to tell the driver to turn left in time, so that we would've taken the shorter path. Not stopping at two different gas stations to try to get the ATM card to work. Any of those things would've given us the five minutes we needed to get that last campsite. But we didn't get it; after over an hour of driving, we watched the people in front of us get it instead.
The ranger directed us to the second-best campground in the area, located at an old water treatment plant a few miles down the road. The park consisted of a modest patch of woods and a reservoir that harbored a cluster of dirty paddle boats. Inside the park office was a "museum" of local wildlife: snakes, an opossum, red-tailed hawks, squirrels, and owls in crudely made cages of fencing, boards, nails, and glass. Dot-matrix printer paper covered the floor of the opossum's 4 ft x 3 ft cell, and the birds were confined to spaces in which they couldn't fly. I left the city to enjoy nature only to find it in captivity.
There was only one other group of campers at there, yet the parking lot was full of cars, presumably there for the wedding in progress on the grass just next to it. We surveyed the area on foot to a soundtrack of the wedding march. No Cape Fear river, no Robert DeNiro, no getting lost in the wilderness.
It was fun anyway. And we had running water.
Spent the evening over at Stef's eating strawberries and Amish bread and drawing up lists of camping items we'll probably forget. Just as well, since whatever I remember I'll have to carry 2.5 miles to the campsite. I'll be back on Sunday, with stories of bears and failed fires and the Cape Fear river and Robert DeNiro.
By the way, my first Mirror Project submission has been posted.
1. A batch of praying mantis the size of dimes were born this morning underneath a bush by my office building. I watched one crawl across a forearm, its body bright green and fragile and bent. 2. Listening to Sigue Sigue Sputnik does not make sitting in a cubicle typing seem any more rock n'roll. In fact, I think it makes it harder to be there. 3. I have a Sigue Sigue Sputnik CD! 4. There was no spring. It's already summer. It was 90 degrees today.
I live on a street with century-old houses on one side, a YMCA parking lot on the other. I live on a street two blocks long, with an IHOP at one end and railroad tracks at the other. Between the IHOP and the first house is a field of grass and clover. On the IHOP-side of the field sits a large metal creature that drinks bacon and french fry grease and lets off a perfume if you come too close. On the house-side of the field is a fraternity known as "Farm House," a white photograph-of-a-house framed by trucks with tires the height of my car.
There are chipped concrete stairs leading up to the field from the sidewalk, stairs that must have once led up to a house, though they are the only remaining evidence of one. It is in this field the strange white rabbits hang out almost every evening. Humans are not of much interest to them, unless you approach them, or unless you throw carrots their way.
This morning on my way to work, I swerved around a white lump of fur in the road and stopped my car. I wasn't sure how I was going to move it, but before I got very close, I saw one of the Farm House guys approach it with a shovel. "Might need two shovels to get this thing," he said in a thick southern accent with a hint of amusement, as he tried to wedge the shovel under the large rabbit. From the way its body reacted to being lifted, it looked like it had been dead a few hours. I got in my car and drove to work. One more left to worry about.
The man with the floppy hat visited my desk again today, this time to show me a black widow he'd caught in the yard. He carried it in a glass jar, and as soon as I saw the eight busy legs, I rolled back in my chair a safe distance. It seemed a bit frantic, its legs working at the lid of the jar as if it were swimming. He held the jar at an angle so as to balance the spider on its back and show me the dark red spot and the sack of eggs.
Cycling through my head: The legs. I don't want those legs on me. I hope it has enough air in there. What could be done with it, so that it's both free and far away from me? How many spiders are in that sack, anyway? Until he walked away taking the spider with him to show someone else, I hadn't noticed the roll of lifesavers he'd left for me.
It was sunny and lightly raining when I left. I pedaled to the farmer's market, past a body on the grass that I didn't see until I was right beside him, distracted by the police car on his other side, by the cop standing over him. I kept going (looking back until they were out of sight), past hordes of ten-year-olds playing soccer and up into the tree-lined streets of the mental institution, where I saw a tombstone for the death of a graveyard.
At the market I filled a bag with "pink ladies," a kind of apple I'd never heard of before, washed one in the water fountain and sat on the curb and ate it. Back up the new yet little-used four-lane road between the market and my house, past the empty bus shelters, empty bike racks, empty sidewalks, browned kudzu and bright green grass, through a ghost town that has yet to be inhabited. Back through the mental institution, again past the soccer players, no rain this time. The body and the cop were gone.
It's Sunday evening. The house is clean and organized, ready to be slowly undone over the course of the coming week.
At the hardware store, a small, cluttered building with insufficient parking and friendly old men with slicked-down hair who know every square centimeter immediately surrounding them. Buckets of bluish nails, letters and numbers on hooks in rows, Beware of Dog signs, old fashioned mousetraps. I went to buy screws and bolts and to get a spare key made for my car, even though I've never locked my existing key inside. When I was in Austin, a girl I knew locked her keys in her car while it was running, and didn't even notice until she got off work, when she found her car, still there, still going.
While I was walking around taking in all of the dusty displays, I overheard an outspoken woman telling how she used to make 50 cents per hour at her job, sometime during the early 60s, I think she said. At another job, she said it was 10 dollars per week that she took home. "Well, I got you beat," one of the old men said. "At my first job I made only 27 cents an hour."
I ran errands all afternoon, satisfying that increasingly frequent urge to dedicate at least a portion of my weekend to doing something productive. It seems to take a lot of time and energy to keep up with my existence, though I'm not sure why that is.
I'm always a little surprised and uncomfortable when one of those poor people who has to work with the public gets annoyed with me. Sometimes I'm impatient or frustrated or incredulous, but none of that makes it to the surface—out of my mouth or to the muscles in my face—at least not until I'm out of range, groaning and narrowing my eyes. On the surface, I'm understanding and patient and careful with my words. (Then again, my second grade teacher literally hated me because I always rolled my eyes at her, and I never even knew I was doing it.)
For years I worked behind counters, an apron tied around me to hold tips, pads and pens, getting refills and scooping ice cream and wiping tomato sauce from plastic booths. I know what it's like to have contempt for the public, to watch them stare at menus with their mouths hanging open, tightening them only to ask you some ridiculous question, or to want to be sarcastic or honest, but to be forced to refrain. I was insulted and harassed and blamed. I'm sorry your meat is overcooked. I'm sorry the popcorn is expensive. I'm sorry this restaurant has a C sanitation grade.
During the summer after my freshman year in college, I was working at a café known for its pastries and chicken salad that was located in the corner of a large department store in the mall, of all things. I was there for the $5 wage plus tips, an anomaly in waitress land. On two occasions I was scheduled to work completely alone during dinner. Granted, dinner was the slower meal, but it was still relatively crowded, and I was by myself, waiting on tables, being the cashier, taking orders at the counter for coffee, frozen yogurt, and doughnuts, bussing the tables, and making sandwiches that I'd never made or even eaten before. I'd stand in the kitchen lightly panicking, hoping no one was robbing the cash register, and I would read the menu as if it were a cookbook. It didn't go as badly as it could have; the customers were actually sympathetic.
So the result of all this is that I am polite to my former peers almost without fail. Today I went to pick up a roll of film that wasn't ready, and I gently asked when I could expect it, and I got a really exasperated "I DON'T KNOW! THE MACHINE IS BROKEN! WE'RE TRYING TO FIX IT!" Right. I'll come back later.
When I was younger, had I had the mind I have now, I would've taken interesting pictures during my two weeks in Romania. I would've written in my journals daily. I wouldn't have "gone with" him, or him, or him. I would've learned where the brake pedal on a car was, so I could've stopped a few of those driverless cars and perhaps a few of the nightmares. I would've paid more attention.
I remember once being too scared to go down the sliding board at the pool. I don't know how old I was, maybe 4?, and I can still remember the black two-eyed box that sprayed the water over the smooth, light blue fiberglass. I'd reluctantly climbed up the ladder and, with my face next to the black box, I stared in fear at the water far below. I don't remember climbing back down, but I do remember not being able to sleep that night, regretting my cowardice, and vowing to make up for it during my next visit to the pool, which couldn't come fast enough. I did, and it was fun.
From ages 2 to 12, I lived on a paved dead-end street surrounded by forest carved with trails and with enough backyard hills to go sledding in winter. The neighbors all knew each other, the kids all played together, and it was basically a harmonious, sub-middle class enclave. So my neighbor was surprised when she watched my mother drive over their terrier, Tramp, without stopping to see if it was okay. (My mother was completely oblivious of the little dog.) Later, my mom saw my neighbor at a local store. "Tramp is dead," she informed my mother. "Oh no, what happened?" My neighbor said simply: "You ran over him."
A girl at work has given me a large Ziploc bag full of soupy, off-white liquid along with a page of instructions. It says I am to squeeze and massage and regularly deflate the bag over a period of ten days before adding a long list of ingredients and exposing the mixture to intense heat. It says that after I have done this, I will have two pans of Amish cinnamon bread.
I don't doubt something will be wrong with my bread; I will go through all that trouble only to have my unusually hot oven turn the bottom inch to black ash, or I will forget to take it out until I smell it, or my error will occur during the ten-day preparation, a result of neglect or confusion.
I don't like to cook, I'm rather impatient, and I like to work on projects from start to finish in one giant lump, rather than working on them in daily segments. So, considering that this girl knows me fairly well, why did she choose me as a recipient of the batter? I have no idea. I'm somehow flattered, though. I've decided I'm going to see this through, all ten days, until my kitchen smells like oxidized matter.
***
Tonight, after getting home from work, (and after giving the batter a healthy squeeze), I got out one of my old German textbooks and began reading aloud, answering the exercises as I went. They're among a few of the textbooks I can visually picture without opening them—the drawings and the pictures, where the words on the page belong, the charts that make sense of articles and cases. While I read over the lessons, I can remember sitting in class in Berlin, my teacher's enunciated voice, and the sentences the boys from Peru would invent. Once I secretly recorded my class, by hiding my Walkman and microphone in a bag beneath my desk.
I've been meaning to read through these books for a while, to slow the steady evacuation of German from my brain, but it's one of those things I never get around to doing. Today, though, I automatically took one off the shelf and collapsed with it on the bed. The words looked familiar and friendly and it was fun to drag up the strange noises, the hisses and umlauts. As I read, my cat sat beside me, distracting me, purring while she stared at me with big, round eyes.
There's a tree on Interstate 40 just west of Raleigh that is considerably higher than the others. The top of it pokes maybe 30 feet out of the rest of the forest like an overripe teenager, just next to the east-bound lanes. I notice it almost every time I approach it, but, as I get closer, I am a victim of angles and it disappears. Sometimes I wonder if anyone else sees the gangly, symmetrical tree, or if I am the only one who appreciates its dissimilarity.
Well, today, I found out it isn't a tree at all, but a radio tower dressed like a tree. Just to be sure, I found my way to its metal base, and stared up at it in disappointment, feeling foolish. I've been tricked.
The slogan of the documentary film festival I'm living through this weekend is "How much reality can you handle?" Today I discovered the answer to that question is about eight hours. From nine-thirty to five-thirty, almost like regular job duty, I traveled from Afghanistan to a World War II Japanese internment camp to Pittsburgh in the 40s to the financial district in New York City on September 11th to Attica Prison in 1971, and, finally, to 1985, to a seven-by-twelve room in Beruit somewhere near the airport.
By the time I'd taken pictures of the question-and-answer sessions after each film, I had an average of fifteen minutes to stand in the sun, squinting, and digest what I'd just seen before being yanked into another time and place. My brain began to make connections between the films that weren't there; during the Attica film, there was a shot in which I could see the Twin Towers looming above, and I half-expected a plane to crash into one of them, which of course didn't happen.
The antidote, of course, was to wear a t-shirt and flannel pajama bottoms underneath a few pounds of blankets, sleep for two hours, wake up to Back Porch Music playing on my alarm clock with my cat sleeping next to my hip, and to listen and think in the dark, so that's what I did.
***
Today my parents have been married 34 years. So, happy anniversary to them.
I wandered into the lobby just after watching "Journeys with George," a documentary about the Bush campaign from the perspective of a correspondent in the Bush press corps. There I found Alexandra Pelosi standing near the middle of the room surrounded by a small cluster of people asking her questions and giving her feedback. The absurd thing about it was that while they spoke, both Pelosi and the audience members filmed each other with hand-held cameras; the former correspondent was reflecting her paparazzi like a mirror. I pulled out my camera and took a few pictures of the exchange, and as I looked through the viewfinder, I heard a stranger say in my ear, "This is so postmodern."
There are a few familiar faces at the festival, people I recognize from school and bars and The Karate Kid, but most are new and remote. Tonight I had to escape the $2 cans of Diet Coke, the awkward standing in the middle of a sea of stylish black clothing, the giant camera bag pulling my right shoulder toward the center of the earth. So I'm home now. For a little while. I don't know why I'm not sleeping. Which reminds me: this morning, as I flung my legs over the edge of the bed, a lens cap fell off the mattress and rolled across the floor.
So I have a pass to the entire festival, but for a frustrating portion of it I have to sit in my cubicle one block away, looking over citizenship questions and changing names to make them sound more international while there are documentaries being shown about Jasper, Texas and September 11th and memory loss as captured by recorded answering machine messages.
This afternoon I walked over to pick up my pass, just before the festival actually began, and I could feel the anticipation descending like a cloud over the concrete patio in front of the theatre. There were only about thirty people there, picking up passes and buying tickets and sitting behind folding tables wearing friendly badges, and, oddly enough, I ran into the DJ whom I photographed last night in Chapel Hill. Actually, I didn't quite run into him; I was at the top of the stairs and he was somewhere in the middle of the patio below me, and we both glanced toward each other at the same moment, paused for recollection delay, and then offered a timid wave before continuing on our respective paths.
All day long I've been trying to fill in every spare moment of time I have, not even wasting stoplights. It's almost 1 a.m. now, and I'm back at home after regrettably skipping out on the end of Yo La Tengo's live accompaniment to French underwater documentaries. But I kept wishing for my bed and to throw away my contacts, and my mind started drifting when the music was mellow and the sea urchins' spines were waving in the water. There's more to tell, but maybe tomorrow.
I realized today that I shouldn't be relaxed at all, but that I should be panicked and stressed, because I'm suddenly enormously busy. No time for personal projects like sleeving negatives or burning CDs. The trash is going to have to quietly stink under its lid, and those clothes on the floor will remain a colorful heap at least for a couple more days.
Most of it is about photos. Two assignments for the Spectator, four days of shooting patrons and filmmakers at a documentary film festival, and one ten-picture compilation for Colectivo, in addition to regular working hours and feeling sick and starting that new website and finishing my parents' anniversary present. And all of it I want to do, with the exception of getting sick, of course.
Tonight I went to a dance club in Chapel Hill to take pictures of tightly-clad long-haired smiling drones who danced in circles and posed when I pointed my camera at them. And pictures of the DJ, his fingers lightly gripping the record, pushing it back and forth on the turntable, next to knobs and switches and crates filled with vinyl, while the disco ball lights scraped over everything.
It's an hour-and-a-half after I told myself I would be in bed.
Strange, how you could be holding something one minute, it gets weighed and stamped, you scribble an address, it gets passed between hands and between vehicles, and just a few days later, someone else far away is holding that very thing, eyeing it and turning it over the way you did just before sticking it in the envelope. It makes transport seem easy, as if all I would have to do would be to cover myself with stamps and wait at the post office, and I could go anywhere I wanted to go, just as long as the postage was right.
What about the things I've dragged around with me while traveling? Mainly, the things that I take and never use—barely even see—when I'm digging through my things. I pack for all weather, all occasions, so it's inevitable that I section off a corner of unwanteds. The pointless kind of transport. Why did I take that shirt from Germany to Raleigh to Austin? I never even wore it. Is it fair that a shirt is more traveled than some people are? Did the red, sore dent in my shoulder appreciate that extra shirt in my bag?
I'm sitting in Raleigh, North Carolina, in my room, at my desk, and you are not here, but you can read what I've been thinking, because I put these words where you can see them. I still haven't gotten used to this kind of transport.
During college, I was required to take four physical education classes: "PE 100," a running/weight-lifting nightmare that was forced on everyone, and three electives. I ended up taking bowling (which was by far my favorite), target archery (during which I was perpetually bruised from snapping the bow's chord repeatedly on my forearm), and tennis. I'd played tennis for a year in high school, but I signed up for beginner's tennis anyway, since I didn't know what to expect of the intermediate class.
Two weeks into the first semester of my freshman year, I got into a careless wreck in which I'd made the glass of my windshield spider by banging it with my tough little head. I wasn't hurt badly, but for a few weeks following the accident I was told I had to wear a neck brace, a scarlet letter to attest to my offense.
So I did what I understand kids do with headgear: I wore the neck brace at home but religiously removed it before going in public. My tennis class was the only exception. I didn't want to permanently screw up my neck for freshman year vanity, so I wore the giant white collar while on the court swinging my racket around. Apparently the tennis coach saw the combination of the neck brace and my relative skill as an opportunity to raise the morale of the class, as he was fond of declaring, "If the girl with the neck brace can do it, you all can do it!"
Tonight I played tennis for the first time this year, actually the second time in two years, and my body sort-of half-remembered what it was supposed to do when that little yellow ball came flying at it. Most of it was warming up or becoming sluggish from exhaustion, but there was a small window in which it felt natural to be out there, the ball and the racquet made that hollow-sounding connection, and the net didn't appear to be abnormally high. But then my energy melted into a sticky puddle on the court that grabbed at the soles of my inappropriate shoes, and my motivation slid away.
