Top of the World Without Flashlights

On the day of graduation back in May, after a rousing and hilarious game of Apples to Apples, my roommates and I and the remainder of our party guests decided to go to Top of the World* so that Abbey, Emma, and I could see it before we were "officially done" with undergraduate. So, we piled into two cars and followed Amanda up the hill to the outlook point.

Top of the World, if I'm explaining correctly, is a scenic outlook at the top of the tallest point in Manhattan. The hill can easily be identified by 'MANHATTAN' in very large letters that has been put into the side of the hill. Visitors can sit and observe the view from the letters, or take various trails that lead down the hill. The night of graduation was the first time I'd ever been there, so I was especially excited though I knew that it was probably the last time I'd get to spend time with Abbey before she left for Chicago.

Once we'd parked and realized that we'd forgotten flashlights--it was after dark--Amanda led us to the Manhattan sign, were there were two couples enjoying the view,** and we took a moment to enjoy the city at night, from Wal-Mart over to the other side of Tuttle Creek Boulevard.

"There's another place that I should show you, c'mon," Amanda said, leading us back up the path and into brush.

My phone was my only light source, and as soon as she headed what seemed in the dark as off the path, I got really nervous. Regardless, I followed Heidi and everyone else down another short path and up onto a wide expanse of concrete surrounded by trees. Here, we couldn't really see a good view of Manhattan because of all the trees, but we could see the stars. Granted, we couldn't see a lot because of the lights from the city, but there were a few that shone brightly enough for us to catch a glimpse of them.

There was a rustling in the brush bordering our viewpoint. Then there were noises. My scaredy-cat side thought we were minutes away from being attacked.

"Are you okay?" I asked Heidi, who was nearby.

"Yeah."

The others became louder. Emma and Amanda scoffed at the sounds, and Abbey was jumping around. Alisha was talking about Darren Criss. I stepped closer to Heidi.

"Seriously?!" I finally called out. It wasn't funny anymore. "This is immature. We are in college. GOD."

Amanda came over to me and placed her hands on my shoulders. "Heather, it's just those jerks we interrupted earlier. We are not going to be attacked. They got mad that we interrupted their make out session, and they're trying to get back at us."

"I KNOW," I shrieked. "But I have an overactive imagination that's going crazy right now. This is why I can't handle horror movies."

We made our way back to the outlook point by the parking lot, giggling, talking, and making jokes while trying to soak up every last delicious moment of what had been an amazing, wonderful day. It had been, truly, the best day, and as curfew came at 11pm, I was devastated that it was over. We said goodbyes to Abbey, exchanged hugs with one another and went our separate ways.

This summer, as far as I can remember, was probably the one that went by the fastest. I read a lot, worked, fine tuned my resume, applied for a few jobs. Packed. Moved into a wonderful little apartment that puts the Tiny Blue Room to shame a hundred times over. Classes have been in session for about two weeks, and it's been so incredibly strange not to be going on to campus. As I wait to hear from the jobs I applied for, I am trying to keep my head in the mindset of what I want to accomplish. Graduation day was so long ago, but it feels like it just happened. I'm thankful for the break, but I know I'll be ready to get back into the groove once graduate school gets here.

How strange time is.


*To this day, I'm not sure if it's officially called Top of the World or Manhattan Hill. For the sake of continuity in this post, I'm going to refer to it as Top of the World.

**They were making out. We were being loud. It was awkward.

In Which There Is an Excerpt from a Novel I Will Never Finish

Last night while I was searching for some character notes, I came across the notebooks containing the very poorly-written novel attempt from when I was in high school. I never finished it, but I felt I had it planned out for sequels and other nonsense. The original partial draft is really bad, poorly written, kind of insensitive, and all sorts of crap. I didn't touch it much past my first creative writing class I took as a sophomore in college, mostly because I began to realize how horrible it was, and by then had grown up a little and had developed much different writing goals than what I had then.

I haven't looked at it in years. And believe me, flipping through it again was much more embarassing than I thought it would be, and I felt very, VERY thankful that I've grown as a writer since then. (Thank goodness for all of my fabulous writing classes and professors.)

I did find a second draft of a scene that wasn't the same degree of awful as the original draft, and so I thought I'd share it below. It was written about six years ago, probably around when I graduated high school or early freshman year of college. Don't say I didn't warn you.


-----

Melinda's basement was large and carpeted in a pretty cranberry shade. The main room, the first you entered when you came down the staircase, was a TV room, complete with two squashy sofas, an armchair, and coffee table. A closet was located beside a doorway leading to two other rooms, Melinda's bedroom and a laundry room.

Melinda led us down the staircase and many of the others went directly for seats on the couches as if they'd done this kind of thing all the time.

Only Kevin, Jessica, mark, and I were left to fend for ourselves for seating.

"Let's have our own party over here," Jessica said, motioning to an open wall area next to the food table, and we sat down as Melinda cleared her throat loudly to get everyone's attention.

"Okay, so before anything begins, a couple of rules. No drinking at this party. It won't be good to have a hangover the second week of school." She paused, while Cody, Kenzi, and Don laughed. "Next, we have to watch the noise level. Mom's organizing her office on the second floor, and she doesn't want to hear us. So, have fun, but not so much that she hears it clearly. Third, this is a movie party, so don't spoil the ending for those who haven't seen it! Also, the theme is 'Double the Fun,' so there will be two movies, two kinds of every kind of food, and--" she gave Kevin an odd look--"we will be playing Fourteen Minutes in Heaven."

"OH MY GOSH," Kevin said. "You're serious?" He fell over on his side in shock when she nodded.

"Names will be drawn for those who are single, and couples will have their own turn as well." Melinda pulled two containers each filled with with folded up pieces of paper out from under the food table. She stuck a hand in one of them, and pulled a slip out. "First up is Dani and Brad."

Danielle squealed loudly as she jumped up from one of the sofas, grabbed her boyfriend's hand, and shimmied into the closet. The door shut behind them with a click of final doom.

"Can we start the movie?" Laura asked, walking up to the DVD unit.

"Yeah," Melinda said, going to help.

"You guys," Kevin said, still on his side. "We get fourteen minutes. At a time."

"Calm down, Romeo," Jessica told him, as he sat up slowly. "If you fuss over it too much, you might not get your Juliet."

"Are you okay with this game, Jess?" Mark asked her, rocking on his knees.

Jessica made a face not unlike when you eat something sour. "Better than spin the bottle any day. Still, there's the element of the unknown along with it...What if I get a weirdo, like Don?"

"I heard that," Don called, his eyes glued to the movie that was now playing on the TV.

Jessica rolled her eyes.

Kevin leaned in. "There's a way to solve that issue, you know."

She raised an eyebrow at him. "What's the answer?"

"Settle down, find a nice steady boyfriend. Then you know he's not weird. AND he wants to kiss you because he loves you for you, and is not just a perverted bag of testosterone."

"Don't talk to me, Kevin, you're making my brain hurt with your crazy outlook on life."

-----


Yep. I need to burn it. *sigh*

Things Jelani and I Talk About

A few months ago, Rebecca Makkai gave a reading on campus as part of the English department's Visiting Writer Series. The selections she read to us were very good, and her responses during the Q&A session were really interesting (her characters were so thoroughly three dimensional, as it seemed from the snippets she read to us, and good character development is something I really admire).

As usual during these sorts of events, I sat with my good friend, Jelani*. Every once and awhile, he will lean over to tell me something about whatever it is we're watching or listening to, or something he finds interesting. During Rebecca Makkai's reading, Jelani made a noise of recognition. I looked at him, curious. He paused, and I offered my notebook to him.**

Humbert is the name of the, uh, main character in Lolita, he wrote along the long side of the page.

Ah. Well. I responded. A minute or so went by, and then I added, I need to read that book. I haven't yet. 

make sure it's the annotated version. the footnotes really enhance the experience.

In a good way or bad way?

very very good. you will need the novel in your right hand, a dictionary in your left in order to make it through that book, btw

Coolbeans. Noted. Will do. 

it's perversely one of the best books ever written. 

Then, later, when Makkai confirmed that she slipped many literary allusions, including Humber from Lolita, in to her book, The Borrower, I gave him a nudge, and pushed my notebook over toward him.

Yay you! 


*He leaves bits of brilliance and intellectualism on The Hype Weekly, and bleeds genius and, on occasion, whimsy, on his personal blog. I also owe him about a billion Poetry Nights at Auntie Mae's. I should probably get on that.

**We have had a lot of conversations over the years, and while most are verbal, there have been a few that have taken place on paper.

Journaling Through Time

My sophomore English teacher required us to journal at the beginning of nearly every class period. He'd write a question in the corner of the marker board, and we'd write for five minutes exactly. The question must be answered, but we were allowed to talk about other things, if we so wished.

When I was home over the weekend, I came across the very Blue Books I'd written in for that semester and a half. Heidi and I took turns reading them before dinner yesterday. 

Me (when she picked up the other off my lap): You do know you are reading my personal, private journal that I wrote in class when I was fifteen? The one that only I (and Mr. Cook) know the contents of? 

Heidi: Yes. 

Heidi (later, jokingly): EW. You are rude: "My sister keeps telling me that she's planning something special for my b-day, but I figure that if she is, she'll probably forget. She does things like that." Well, now I know what you think of me. 

Reading the journals made me embarrassed not only for myself, but for my English teacher, who, I'm sure, had to read many of these hormone-ridden sob-fests over the years. (I'm sorry, Mr. Cook. I wish I'd written something more philosophical and interesting for you to read.) But mostly, I was intrigued, because I learned some important things. 

1. I repeatedly mentioned how I wished everyone would understand that my writing wasn't to gain vengeance on my classmates. (I wonder if I was paranoid.)
2. I tried (and failed) writing HP fanfic at 15. 
3. For the first chunk of journal, I mention the first two HP movies, but never by name. I can bet you fifty bucks that everyone (including my teacher) knew exactly what they were. 
4. There is a lot of this: "...THAT I AM NORMAL!! Well, kind of...maybe. I don't know" and this: "I can be an okay person if people would give me the time of day. Oh, and another reason I enjoy writing is because Heather has no social life, so she spends her time making up fantasy social lives so that she doesn't go insane with boredom." This is some of the most honest bits of the journal; I remember feeling this way every day. 
5. Above everything else, what I valued most in others (and prayed, in turn, others would value in me) was a good heart and good mind as opposed to a pretty face and hot bod. 
6. I talk a LOT about Prisoner of Azkaban movie (which, at the time, was to come out after that school year ended), Daniel Radcliffe, and Return of the King. 
7. The above, I realized, was because I needed a distraction to everything that was happening that year. And that year, truly, was a nightmare. I kept a lot of my feelings to myself. My emotions (and the events that affected them) were not safe in those blue booklets. 
8. As soon as my grandmother passed away that year, the entries spent a lot of time agonizing about how unfair life was. Her passing shattered everything. 
9. I was lonely. It becomes more evident as the journal progresses toward my 16th birthday, the age my parents told me I was allowed to begin dating. In relation to that, I was naive enough to think that there would be people lined up, waiting to date me. I don't think the loneliness was limited to romance, however. I mention my sister and my best friend, but I don't mention any of the other people I knew I hung out with in school. 

Out of curiosity, I pulled out the diary I kept for most of that year, just to compare the two. My real, private diary is a little more honest, but I know I kept things from it, too. The real diary contains better writing (at the beginning, before the entries become distracted with talk about crushes and movie stars). But there are correlations. Small ones, at that, but they're there. 

"God, I was such a drama queen," I declared as soon as I finished reading both booklets. Dad chuckled a little, and five minutes later, Mom let us know that dinner was ready.

A drama queen, yes. And yet the things I want to respond with: You will change your opinion of Buffy, though you technically won't see much more of the show than you have at this point. You will still be afraid of death, though you will fervently admire Emily Dickinson's view on the subject. Wait till you see DH parts 1 and 2 (and you will still love the HP books like there's no tomorrow, appreciating it more and more as you get older, for many reasons). For goodness sake, read Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson and The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky. And you will certainly meet some beautiful, wonderful human beings who love you, and whom you will love in return; these people will stick themselves to you like glue. 

And so on. There are, of course, a few other things I'd add, but I would probably keep them to myself. Because I have to learn things, and grow. 

Ground Control to Major Tom

So this post really isn't about David Bowie. But as crazy as things have been in the last week, as they are likely to be until move-out day on Friday, the countdown seems especially appropriate (even if it really isn't in the grand scheme of things).

As I write this post, I am sitting in a laundromat, glancing up at the dryers every thirty seconds like the crazy person I have surely become. Just outside the front door of the facility is a fancy silver sports car with a Batman plate on the front. I can't help but think of seeing the new movie just two days ago, and, by extension, the tragedy in Colorado that took place the same day. A young couple sits two tables down from me, the boy reading Catching Fire while his girlfriend fiddles with her phone beside him. Others come in and out, carrying a helluvah lot less laundry than I did nearly an hour ago.

My basement-dwelling roomies discovered what they think is a pretty mild case of bed bugs this morning, and though I personally do not live in the basement and use a mattress cover, I wanted needed to take precautionary measures.

It's not really fun to have to deal with stuff like this. And though Emma told me that, if it absolutely had to happen, she's glad it happened so close to us getting out of that blasted house, I was still nervous and frustrated that it had to happen at all. I just don't handle stress well. I couldn't think straight when my mom called earlier; I felt especially bad about it because I haven't had the chance to talk to her in a week.

And so now I've found myself at the laundromat with twenty dollars-worth of quarters in my pocket (long story short: I should have gotten change from the twenty, first). The HG fan and his girlfriend have since left, interestingly enough, in the sportscar/Batmobile. All of my clothes are now in dryers. I feel gross from having worked and then battled the heat to bring my stuff across town. In my haste, I didn't quite understand that 25 cents equals 9 minutes of dryer time, and thus more quarters meant more time. Along with saving time and money, I could have also saved dryer space.

And then there's everything else. Moving, of course. The job search I've put on hold, briefly, so I can move without completely losing my head. And then there is the continued news from Colorado. What a terrible thing to have happened. It breaks my heart to know that things like this actually do happen. People actually set out to hurt others. Why, I don't know. But I'm praying for the victims and their families.

Also, I haven't eaten dinner yet. This is Major Tom.

Moments

When I was a junior in high school, we had an assignment in English class that required us to find a song that best represented any of the ideas of Transcendentalism. After going through all my CDs, I finally decided on "Parklife" by Blur, which to me best represented connecting to nature.* Jackie, one of my classmates, picked a song called "I Woke Up In A Car" by Something Corporate. I was so caught up in it, I had to ask her what the artist was and wrote it down in a margin in my notebook.

The song is really good. Some people might write it off as being too "emo" or [insert complaint here]. But honestly? It's a solid, well-written, well-produced track off of a strong album. I get annoyed with really particular classifications when it comes to music; music is far too diverse to allow for any accurate placement. Some songs pull from too many directions, and I really, really hate it when people use a song's "classification" as a reason against it, as if it's not worthy of our time because it falls into a certain category. But I digress.

I didn't get a copy of the song until shortly after my high school graduation, and since then I've listened to it over and over, repeating it on mixes and getting lost within its lyrics and musicianship and pure awesomeness.

I've been up and down over the last week. I've been trying to find ways of cheering myself up; I read Lola and the Boy Next Door over the weekend, and while I was cheered up reading it (because it's so, so good), I still cried at the end because it affected me so. I finished This Full House and loved it, but also cried at the end for different but related reasons. Work, as usual, provides me five hours daily to mull everything over. And over. And over. It's rough being inside one's head for too long. I was driving myself crazy. I hate finding myself in a funk; I have such a hard time pulling myself out of it.

"I Woke Up In A Car" came up on my iPod earlier tonight at work, and it must have hit me at just the right moment. The song talks about the joys of embracing the unknown, of finding peace with oneself in the moment. I don't know if I could survive without some kind of structure, but I like the idea of allowing myself liberation in the moment. I was reminded that the funk will lift.** The next couple years will be interesting, and will likely allow me these moments. And I'm so ready for them.

So, all in all, I'm not feeling 100% better. (I need Earl Grey.) But I am feeling marginally better.


*I remember obnoxiously singing along with it in class; if anyone reading this now happened to be in that hour, my apologies. I don't think I understood the difference between socially okay and socially obnoxious.

**I hate how sappy this sounds. *sigh*

Treading and Geraniums

When my upstairs roomie came back from work today, I greeted her with a big smile and threw my arms out. "I AM MAKING US DINNER," I announced.

She gave me a worried look.

"What?" I asked her, my smile falling. "Seriously, it'll be good. And it'll use up some of the stuff from the freezer so we don't have to move it next month. I called my mom and she gave me a recipe suggestion."

Her face didn't change at all.

Ultimately, I screwed up the baked potatoes. I forgot to poke them, and they were still a little hard in the middle. I had to reheat mine in the microwave. The chicken was kind of dry (though I encounter this problem whenever I heat up/bake chicken), but the salsa and seasonings tasted all right. My roomie didn't say anything about how she felt about the meal, only answering with an indifferent "fine" when I asked her how the chicken was.

I came out of the experience knowing that my roomie thought my cooking skills were appalling.* But I suppose it doesn't matter that much.

I leave the Tiny Blue Room in a month and a half. The room after the Tiny Blue Room will likely be the same size or even smaller. I don't trust my memory of how big the room really is. It will be, after all, a mere corner of the apartment I'm moving into with my roommate. There is much I have yet to pare down, and it's already halfway through June.

Another of my roomies, Amanda, brought me back a geranium from her work a few weeks ago. She works in a flower shop and has been bringing back ferns, flower arrangements, and just today, a Venus fly trap, for us to enjoy and care for. I was excited about the geranium. I've been trying not to over-water it and pulling off the browning leaves every few days. When we move, I want to put it just outside our door so it can enjoy the fresh air. 

Life after something so ingrained is almost bizarre. Everything seems so much more domestic, much more alien to the senses. The plants need to be watered. Walking the dog doesn't have to be a chore. Cooking is suddenly something that can actually be done, most of the time, but mostly it seems nearly impossible. Time between, before, and after work shifts must be used wisely. Evenings have become open. What is this strange stasis I've found myself in?

The crazy thing is that it's not really a stasis at all. It's more transitionary. I'm trying to adjust myself to the schedule of a graduate. A lot of my college friends have moved: Crystal is in Indiana, Whitney and Abbey in Illinois, others have or soon will be returning to their respective hometowns or new homes in far off places. I've just started the job search and will soon be diving into the grad school application process. Time seems to work differently, now. Things don't work per semester in the real world. I wonder if it's more by season, or perhaps the days meld together in one big clump and the only way to know the date is by the weather when you leave for your lunch break.

I know I'll be glad to get back into the learning mode whenever I start grad school. But for now, I'll enjoy writing, drawing, and adjusting to this new life. Especially evenings like tonight, in which Amanda suggests making pina coladas and indulging in both chips and salsa and mint chocolate chip ice cream. Which, of course, is a delicious combination.



*With that being said, another of my roomies tried the chicken and liked it. When I make the recipe again, I'll know what to do and what not to do.