This morning I stood outside the brick building where my landlord(s) live. There were four of us congregating there, though I didn't know the others. It wasn't immediately clear that they were waiting for the same person I was waiting for, but for some reason it gave me hope that they wanted entrance into the same building, as if that gave me a better chance. One of them looked like Ioki from 21 Jump Street, and I never noticed the details of the remaining two. I was just aware of two upright bodies behind me, facing the same metal door that I was, hands in pockets, breathing cold smoke.

I kept dialing her number, letting it ring four times, hanging up, letting it ring another four times. It wasn't that I suspected she was there, really; it was that I needed to pay my rent and get to work and I didn't know what else to do, except punch the little buttons and hold the phone to my head. Ioki started yelling her name. Mrs. Knoll! Mrs. Knoll!, always in twos, his voice being swallowed by brick.

I don't know how long we waited there. Eventually one of the cosa nostra walked around the corner, peeling a key off of a keyring as he walked. The others vocally jumped him. Let us in! You can let us in! We climbed the stairs in a tight pack, and the man opened the door to the landlord's apartment. There she was. Well, one of them. Standing there expectant, as if she'd invited this very group over herself, as if she'd answered the phone and pressed the buzzer. But she hadn't.

***

Tomorrow Siouxsie Sioux will be taking the L train, sitting at my desk, cupping a mouse and positioning her dark-rimmed eyes too close to my monitor, visiting my new doctor, and walking in a Halloween parade on a street near my office. Later, she will quietly slip down my drain in a river of soap and water, only to be exhumed again on Friday.

Looking back over what I said is like watching a horror movie. In it, I'm the main character, and I can see myself walking steadily toward the haunted house, pushing open the creaky door, and walking into the trap. I plead with myself not to do it, to have foresight, to change courses, but the girl I'm yelling at is deaf and stupidly determined.

Tonight I don't feel like living alone. Right now I want a roommate, someone with whom I can talk and maybe cook, but not make plans with or set aside a chunk of hours for. I want it to be easy and thoughtless with my imaginary roommate, because I want to be thoughtless.

It feels so much later than it is, just because we have collectively decided that winter should be dark. Moving the clock back is only good for one day.

It didn't take long for the buildings to shrink, to flatten and space themselves apart and sink into the earth, for bright orange trees to stand in their place, for the middle of civilization to be transformed into the middle of nowhere. I hiked a trail at the top of a mountain and saw nothing but contoured hills of flamboyantly dying leaves and white post-rain haze. When canoeing down the Delaware river, Tripti and I drifted away from the others and floated downstream almost silently, nothing on either side of us but hills and crooked trees, surroundings that looked something like the autumnized set of Deliverance.

The Inn itself reminded me of The Overlook, but with a swarm of environmentalists moving through it, and a few local pear-shaped golfers moving around it. As part of the swarm, I went to workshops, listened to speakers, danced, talked, talked too much, played games, and temporarily learned how to line dance from two sixty-year-old cowgirls. The bus ride home today was groggy and quiet.

"...the Party taught that the proles were natural inferiors who must be kept in subjection, like animals, by the application of a few simple rules. In reality very little was known about the proles. It was not necessary to know much. So long as they continued to work and breed, their other activities were without importance.

"Left to themselves, like cattle turned loose upon the plains of Argentina, they had reverted to a style of life that appeared to be natural to them, a sort of ancestral pattern. They were born, they grew up in the gutters, they went to work at twelve, they passed through a brief blossoming period of beauty and sexual desire, they married at twenty, they were middle-age at thirty, they died, for the most part, at sixty. Heavy physical work, the care of home and children, petty quarrels with neighbors, films, football, beer, and, above all, gambling filled up the horizon of their minds.

"To keep them in control was not difficult. A few agents of the Thought Police moved always among them, spreading false rumors and marking down and eliminating the few individuals who were judged capable of becoming dangerous; but no attempt was made to indoctrinate them with the ideology of the Party. It was not desirable that the proles should have strong political feelings. All that was required of them was a primitive patriotism which could be appealed to whenever it was necessary to make them accept longer working hours or shorter rations. And even when they became discontented, as they sometimes did, their discontent led nowhere, because, being without general ideas, they could only focus it on petty specific grievances. The larger evils invariably escaped their notice."

—from 1984, by George Orwell (paragraph divisions mine). It's causing me to miss my stop on the subway.

***

On Thursday I'm leaving for the Poconos, for an office retreat. I'll be back on Sunday.

On Saturday we drove around the disjointed streets of Queens, dead-ending in a chorus of "left!"s and "right!"s, asking directions from disinterested people, passing turns, turning maps sideways and upside-down. But it only took us an hour to find the school by car, which was comparatively brief.

It was an elementary school of long hallways, held together with construction paper and tape that formed the shapes of ghosts, cats, and autumn leaves and showcased the names of school children. On the doors and walls and floors were silhouettes scrawled in black marker; it was our job to color in those spaces with paint. Martin and I took the door to the cafeteria, a squat pink-gutted room filled with tiny chairs and crumbs, evidence of surges of bustling life that made the room seem strikingly vacant.

There was fruit on our door, and vegetables on its twin, where a popular woman named Lisa was steadily working and humming to the R&B being broadcast over the intercom. I started with the bananas and moved on to the star fruit, cleaned up the purple paint fugitives running from the grapes, highlighted the pear. Outside, there was a group working on a mural of the United States, a terribly inaccurate but attractive piece that covered a large slab of courtyard concrete. Later it would decorate the bottoms of little kids' shoes in bright colors, which would in turn spread parts of North Dakota into Colorado, and parts of Colorado into Arizona.

At three our jobs expired. We threw our bleeding brushes into a bucket of paint thinner, collected a certificate, and left the school permanently. Sort of.

Some of them are amazing. Tonight on my way home from work, I stopped to listen to one standing near a subway entrance at Union Square. He was playing a banjo, picking out a flood of crisp notes with quick, easy fingers. He was singing, high and low, a folk song that sounded somehow old and rural. He had a nice voice.

He had a drum tied to his back. His right leg was connected to the mallet by a wire, and another wire connected his left leg to a set of cymbals. He would move his heels in a reverse tapping of the foot, lifting his right heel to bang the drum, lifting his left to clap the cymbals, while simultaneously singing and articulating his banjo, performing the work of three or four people. It took me a moment to fully grasp the extent of his performance. When I stopped to listen, there were a few people standing there, scattered, ahead of me. By the time I walked away, he'd attracted a substantial crowd.

This morning I saw one of my favorites. He plays the acoustic guitar and blows on a series of narrow uneven pipes that are positioned on a metal rack in front of him. Sometimes he strokes the pipes with his breath, producing a sound something like a hand being strung down a piano, from the last key to the first.

He wears his long black hair in a ponytail and alters his facial expressions between happy and surprised. He seems to lose himself in his own music and forget that he's in public, which is something I really enjoy watching, perhaps because I doubt I could ever do the same. It drags me into the music as well, to see someone producing and being, rather than someone who just skirts over the surface and observes.

On Sunday I noticed I was starting to get sick, so rather than going out with a friend from Raleigh who was in town, I remained at home, so that I could swallow pellets of vitamin C, drink tea, take a warm bath, and watch a movie. I patiently waited for the water spewing out of the bathtub faucet to get hot, timidly testing it with my hand so I wouldn't get burned. It never even got warm.

Desperately and wastefully, I began boiling pots of water on my gas stove, carrying them carefully toward the bath, dodging my cat, pouring their steaming contents into the suddenly large basin. One, two, three, four, and again. I must've combined twelve pots of boiling water with a few inches of cold I'd put in, but the cold just swallowed the hot like a light snack, destroying all evidence of my labor. I gave up and waited until the next day, when the hot water miraculously returned.

***

Monday was a holiday, which I spent underneath pounds of covers, reading, running errands. I took my first trip to the local laundromat, where I sat sniffling and reading 1984 and retracting my legs every few seconds to avoid tripping the screaming children running around a block of washing machines.

A few minutes before I was about to leave, a pudgy young girl came up to me and asked whether I could change her dollar into quarters. I could and did, and she disappeared. A moment later, she returned and told me that the machine had eaten her quarter. "That's too bad," I said, as I folded the last of my hot clothes. On my way out the door, she caught me again and boldly asked me whether I could give her the money the machine had taken from her. (I refused.)

***

I'd already chopped the garlic, green onions, and carrots for soup when I noticed that I don't own a can opener. I grabbed my keys and my bag and ran across the street to the VGF Town, a long and narrow shop that dangles orange, curly fly-paper in ribbons above the fruit. No can opener. A block away at another store, I bought the last available tool that called itself a "can opener," though I'd never seen anything like it. How hard can it be to operate?

Once at home, I tried every conceivable angle at least twice, called my mom in vain, and considered puncturing the bloody can with a sharp knife. Instead, I knocked on the door to the nearest apartment, with my can and opener in hand. "Hi, sorry to bother you, but do you know how to open this can using this thing?" He laughed heartily for a rather small guy, and just let me use his conventional opener. "Have you ever seen one of these before?" I asked. He explained that he had, but that they were only to be used in times of crisis.

I still don't know how to use it. Incidentally, tonight I unintentionally bent and broke my cheap wine opener (and broke the cork in half as well). Although I will admit to not being especially mechanically inclined, I swear it isn't me this time.

We didn't camp this weekend. It was cold, the rain fell steadily, and the 20 mile-per-hour winds promised to collapse our feeble nylon homes. Instead we ate dinner at a New Jersey diner and went bowling with a few of my relatives on my dad's side of the family. At the diner, while standing at a bathroom sink, I encountered a woman who'd never experienced a faucet that turns on automatically. "I stood right next to it and it came right on!" she exclaimed. "Pretty soon you won't have to do anything!" She half-directed her comment at me, but only because I was the one standing there. I just nodded and smiled, unsure of how to respond.

On Saturday it was my Mom's half of the family: my grandparents' anniversary combined with an overdue family reunion.

The walls and shelves and tabletops at my grandparents' house are covered with pictures, pictures that are never retired or replaced, only added to. Most of them are the same pictures that were there when I was a little girl—dated pictures of my cousins, aunts, and uncles—hanging in pearl chain-like frames, adjacent to faded paint-by-number artwork my mom and her brother produced when they were young.

I saw more of those pictures than I did that side of the family, and much of my memory of them is frozen in 70s-style haircuts and big-print shirts, expressions that never change or tire. That must be how they know me, as well—age 12 with blond hair and a bad perm, sitting unnaturally in front of a blue watercolor canvas. All of us visited our grandparents, and inevitably saw those pictures, even if we didn't see much of each other.

So there was a little bit of pressure getting ready for the event on Saturday, knowing that whatever picture was taken of you was going to be the picture people see of you for the next ten years; likely in a few years it'll receive the tip of a finger along with the question, "who's that?"

But it was rather relaxed; I'm not sure why I anticipated otherwise. I shouldn't be so reluctant to leave my element.

My parents are sleeping in the next room, after having driven up from North Carolina this morning. Tonight we walked around my neighborhood in a pitiful misty rain and ate dinner at a Vietnamese/Peruvian place underneath the direction of a waitress with a forced giggle. As we walked back to my place full of rice-rice paper-rice noodles, my father looked up and down the streets with a watchful eye, rewarding each avenue a tacit safety-rating. They both like the place, they say. I hope their car's okay in the morning.

Tomorrow night (and the next) we'll be sleeping in tents in New Jersey, next to tents housing remote relatives (some of whom I haven't seen in about a decade), underneath fat, dark clouds spouting out less pitiful rain. There will be trees, I'm told.

The walls are white, and of course they are: they are white on white on white, layer after layer, that no matter how deep you drill into the wall, the drill bit returns with a dusty coat of flakes all the way up to its neck. The place you really notice is around the borders of the doors, where you can tell that the lines were once sharp but are now so smoothed over with paint that they blend softly into the wall, creeping down in a gentle slope. And the cabinets and the doors, all of them wearing so many coats that they have trouble stuffing themselves in the places they're meant to go. Underneath there somewhere, I'm sure there are spots and stains and holes and bruises, hiding in their secret layers from each new tenant.

But the windows, they can't be painted. Today I cleaned them for the first time, while in the midst of hanging the curtains "properly," an exercise that took hours and caused me to get plaster in my eye and burn my finger and crawl around on the floor smacking a blind hand under furniture in order to retrieve finishing nails.

The first three attempts at each window turned my cloth completely black, as if my predecessor had been a diesel vehicle of some sort, and the back window had a patch of jagged blue crayon in its center. Prior to cleaning the windows, I had been able to see through them just fine, which was a surprise once I discovered the blanket of dark that covered them. Perhaps it's like LA, where you don't really notice the smog when you're underneath it.

I think it's finished now.

It feels as if my head is plugged in and there's a current running through it, quietly humming like my computer. Lisa and Wolfe had been talking about taking me to see Mindless Self-Indulgence for weeks, telling me stories, like how, at the last show, the band exited the building through the front doors and finished its set on top of a van.

The lead singer, whom the crowd kept calling "Jimmy," had a double hot pink mohawk, wore a white suit with a black tie and a long white skirt, and sometimes sang holding what looked like a stuffed wolf. (He actually looked a little bit like Ryan, apart from the hair and the height.) His voice oscillated between falsetto and a more natural singing voice, and his facial expressions and gestures looked fluid enough to have been choreographed, but I knew otherwise. The band clearly was insane and unpredictable.

The mosh pits weren't just cluttered around the stage, but scattered around the floor and watched over by those in the balcony that circled the room. It was impossible to completely avoid getting knocked around; mostly I stood with feet parted, as I would on the subway during take-off and landing, with no bar to hold onto. By the time the show was over, I'd involuntarily moved fifteen feet from where I'd started.

Lots of people who looked eighteen, lots of spiky hair and spiky belts, spiky jewelry. I got a little worried when a guy with five two-inch spikes protruding from his face jumped around near me, due to the nature of the most pits. Lisa noted that it adds a new dimension to a show, when there's a chance you might get injured during the course of it.

Immediately after leaving the venue, I stopped at a grocery store to buy some water, in an abrupt transition to normalcy: rows of neatly stacked food underneath bright lights, people in warm sensible sweaters standing in line, quiet. *

I'm bad at guessing quantities, so I have no idea how many people were in Central Park today, and since I almost never watch TV, I don't know if anyone else knows either. Thousands, certainly; thousands of other frustrated people who make me wonder about the validity of the polls that claim the majority of us want war. I haven't met any. I have trouble understanding the pro-war argument.

***

As of last night, I am again carless, which means I no longer have to (one) remember where I parked, (two) remember whether that side of the road is scheduled to be cleaned the next day, (three) remember to move the car before I'm lying in bed, (four) drive around the neighborhood making figure eights, (five) wonder why there's a parking space (thinking that if it's free, something must be wrong with it), (six) debate whether I should tell the 300-pound man that I wish he wouldn't sit on the hood of my car, (seven) clean off the egg yolk and shell smeared on top of Ingo's car, or (eight) worry about getting parking tickets, which I was told are now $105 in Manhattan. I am going to miss it a little.

My new apartment is a railroad style apartment, which means it's long and relatively thin and that the rooms line up like boxcars. I moved in on Sunday afternoon, and it wasn't until today that I was able to walk in a straight line from the engine to the caboose without stepping over anything.

After a short period of uncertainty prior to my move, I've decided that I like the place quite a bit, that I don't think I could've found an apartment that suits me better, assuming I don't get sick of Spanish music anytime soon.

The last several days bleed together: Martin drove my car and my cat from Raleigh to Brooklyn; I scraped mysterious flecks of yellow from the knobs on my stove; Martin and I and lots of other people spent my lunch break watching a free White Stripes concert at Union Square; I bought a level and became a little obsessed with it, testing the angles of everything I attached to the wall; old Cuban men playing checkers watched my car as I unloaded it, assuring me that they wouldn't let anything happen to my stuff; my cat discovered the fire escape.

Three a.m.: Lisa, have you seen Jane? After a quick check in the usual corners, I took the fire escape, carefully gripping the thin red bars and quietly moving up past dark windows. Martin walked around the alley that surrounds the building like a moat, carrying a flashlight and whistling for her. He insisted that she must be inside, that there was nowhere for her to go.

Almost an hour later, we were standing on the roof, pointing the flashlight down, forming a weak V of light that barely reached the construction site behind my building, when we saw a plump gray figure walking along a high concrete wall. We ran down the stairs in a long spiral, trying to find a balance between quiet and quick. I helped hoist Martin onto the wall, one black Converse shoe standing on my thigh, the other in my cupped hands. Just as he was able to pull himself up and stand, Jane looked at him, jumped back over to the fire escape, darted up to the second floor, and hopped in my window.