My mustard-colored singlespeed Salsa Casseroll was stolen from the corner of 18th and Park NW. It has Soma Oxford handlebars, cork grips, black fenders, a black saddle bag and a hideous saddle that says DEMO on the side. Vittoria Randonneur 32″ tires, a Crane bell, a variety of lights, etc. Goes by the name Col. Mustard. Small reward will be given for information that leads to his return. Thanks.
File this under “My New Life.”
For the past two and a half months, I have lived in the federal enclave/douchebag incubator known as Washington, D.C. This is the first time I’ve lived in a major city since I pretended to be an intern in London a million years ago and I kind of forget how to do it. I’m only just barely figuring out how to go grocery shopping and get to work on the bus without having a cataclysmic meltdown every time I leave my house. There are too many people, too many cars, too many service workers who want nothing more than for me to have a miserable, confusing shopping experience that makes me hate my wretched existence and theirs, too.
Then there’s the conundrum of making friends. How do you meet people, especially people who have room in their lives for just one more friend? (FYI, those people don’t exist. Everyone is chock-a-block with friends at present.) Further complicating the matter, how do you meet people you want to bone? Or just date, if you’re classy? I have always been fairly crap at all this, so the prospect of having to make an effort to have contact with humans beyond my circle of gay boyfriends is daunting.
But you can’t meet people by sitting at home on your hand-me-down couch petting your dog while watching reruns of Shahs of Sunset (can we all just agree that those surgically augmented, money-grubbing, stink rags are giving Persians kind of a bad rap?). So I decided I had to do what every sad, single DC-ite (DC-er, DC-ist, DC-ian?) before me has done — I cannonballed into the online dating pool.
She’s not a cyborg; she’s a psychology study participant.
Since I now work for an institution of higher learning, I have access to a multitude of benefits that normal working plebes only dream of. Like free tuition for the kids I don’t have. Or a drastically reduced master’s degree like the one I already earned. Or a cheap membership to the university gym where you can do the dumb elliptical machine next to some bubbly co-ed who has no idea that in 10 years her ass is going to resemble Newt Gingrich’s jowls.
As a university employee, you can also take part in various laboratory studies. Now this might not seem like an immediate benefit, but when you sit in a grim taupe cubicle listening to people gasbag about “performance management plans” and “strategic goals,” getting poked and prodded and being told to find the block of cheese at the end of the maze seems like a pretty awesome thing.
My goal while I am employed at this university is to participate in every single study for which I am eligible. Everyone has to have something to work towards at their job and this is mine. Now, you might think I’m doing it for the money. But I’m pretty sure this university only pays $5/half an hour to study participants, so I’m not going to get rich doing this. Unless I sign up for some 72-hour sleep deprivation study. And I think that $180 = I’m rich.
No, I don’t plan on doing these studies for the money. I plan on doing them to help advance scientific inquiry. And to lech out on some undergrads. Today was my first study.
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Home sweet moving container.
So I moved to DC a week ago from Vermont and things are going really well so far. And by really well, I’m mean they’re going about the same as Todd Akin’s campaign to upend Sen. Claire McCaskill (I’m in DC so this is the obligatory political reference) went. Which is to say it’s going crap.
Allow me to explain with as much brevity as I am able. Which is not much.
First, there was a hurricane named Sandy, who came blazing into town wearing a satiny Pink Ladies jacket singing Summer Nights and looking all doe-eyed. Except she wasn’t actually doe-eyed since she practically wiped out coastal New Jersey. Because of the storm, all my worldly belongings got held up in a moving truck somewhere near Scranton. Which is an amazing place to get stuck, by the way. As a result, they weren’t delivered until a few days after I moved into my apartment. No huge tragedy considering the scope of the storm, but an annoyance to be sure. Unless you like sleeping on an air mattress and crying into your pan-Latin(o) takeout. Which I don’t.
When my stuff finally arrived (all in one piece thanks to the amazing Tetris packing skillz of my pal, Warren), I realized I would have to take care of the arduous task of unloading my mobile storage unit myself. Being new to a place means that you have no friends and thus nobody to help you do anything without payment. Luckily, I have a couple of friends in the area. Unfortunately, they’re all homosexual men who don’t like getting dirty. Ooh, icky. So I put on my Hulkamaniac hat and went to work alone.
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Dear Vermont,
I love you, but I have to leave you. Perhaps you can take heart in this: it’s not you; it’s me. Well, it’s kind of you. But it’s mostly me.
When I met you, I never thought this relationship would last as long as it did. I thought we’d have some good times, some laughs, some learning experiences and then I’d move on. But relationships take funny twists and turns and here we are seven years later, still making a go of it.
We’ve had a good run, you and me, Vermont. I never anticipated loving your proud Green Mountains, your stoic maple stands, your sanctifying lake, your jewel-toned foliage, your hardscrabble people, your homespun trappings and your can-do ways as much as I do. You have informed my worldview more than any college lecture or newspaper article ever could. You have taught me so much and I hope in some small way I have repaid the favor.
From you, I have learned how to be a better neighbor, lover, partner, friend. To be a better steward of your majesty. I have learned to how to hike a trail without looking down at my boots, to always keep my eyes ahead. I have learned how to distinguish different types of snowfall, to understand that January’s snows are different than those in March. Speaking of snow, you have taught me how to recreate in it, how to walk cautiously under trees heavy with it, how to get along in spite of it. You have taught me to endure, to suffer, to persevere. You have taught me about bounty, about growth, about change. You have taught me that you cannot stop pedaling if you’re biking up a hill — you will never crest it that way. Conversely, you have taught me that the reward for that slow, steady push is always that thrilling ride down.
Our relationship was one of firsts for me. They’re too numerous to mention. But suffice it to say, the firsts we experienced together will not be lasts, at least not for me.
I’m moving on to another place, a bigger place, a place not known for its singular uniqueness, its quirkiness, its winters. I will be warmer there, it’s true. But I will have to search harder to find its essence, to seek out what makes it special. It might not sing to me the way you do, Vermont. Its communities might not be as resilient, its people not as brave. There will be no admirable Yankee thriftiness, no charming glottal stops. Indeed, it is a company town, and that bears remembering. But it holds things I need to experience before I become too timid. Bustle, noise, variety, intrigue, the whole infinite and dizzying panoply of human life. Urbanity.
I do not take our parting lightly, Vermont. I may come to regret our break-up. I may yet feel the pull of your pristine ponds, your undulating pastures, the smell of your raw earth. If so, I know you’ll still be here for me, like family. I know you will envelope me as though I never left. You will tell me your secrets on dirt roads, in farm fields, from atop your many peaks. And I will listen, as I have always done. And I will be better for it.
I remain, devotedly yours,
Lauren
For the zero of you who care, I figured I’d post a little update on what I’ve been up to for the past five weeks. Here it is in one mellifluous word: radio. Here it is in another slightly less aurally pleasing word: suffering. Yes, radio is suffering. But the good kind of suffering, the kind that comes after a long, hard run. Which I wouldn’t know anything about since running is dumb, unless you’re running away from the cops or running towards a million dollars.
Anyway, radio storytelling is hard work. Normally, I am averse to anything that even has a whiff of hard work. But radio is a different animal altogether. It allows one to tell other people’s stories while throwing in a little masturbatory performance of your own into the mix. Unless you do non-narrated pieces, which I won’t be attempting because one, I want to hear the sound of my own voice, and two, they seem way too hard.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. You might recall a few months back that I unabashedly begged you for money to help me attend the Transom Story Workshop in Woods Hole, Mass., a little spit of a village on upper Cape Cod. Or lower. I haven’t yet gotten the geography of this disgustingly beautiful place down yet. At the beginning of April, I hopped in the sweet-ass Vibe and drove down to the cape to begin my new life as a huge radio star. But, as I mentioned a paragraph ago, radio is hard. Considering that I am barely able to turn on my recorder without electrocuting myself, the chances of me becoming a huge radio star are pretty slim.
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Since my only job these days is to stay good-looking and not die, I have some time on my hands. So I figured I might spend some of it volunteering for my local public radio station during one of its insufferable pledge drives. I swear those things happen with more frequency than failed senator/presidential candidate Rick Santorum says something like this. Which at this point in the Republican primary is like all the time.
When I signed up for a volunteer shift manning the phones and relieving people of their money, I was told the only open slots were 6-9 a.m. Awesome. Because there’s nothing I like better than waking before dawn and pretending to be cheerful about it. But I figured this would be my penance for the years I spent listening to public radio for free, so like a traumatized former Catholic, I took the punishment and thanked them for it.
I arrived at 6 a.m. and was ushered into a room with banks of laptops and phone headsets. I was easily the youngest volunteer by about 50 years and that’s saying something since I’m like nearly 60 (I kid. I love the old!). I was also the sleepiest. The other volunteers were as perky as Katie Couric during her TODAY Show days. The volunteer coordinator gave me a packet of instructions and told me to do a little dry run-through before I began answering any calls. When I felt comfortable that I’d be able to fake knowing anything at all about the pledge drive or Vermont Public Radio reasonably well, I punched in to take some calls.
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Recently, I discovered I had been defriended by someone on Facebook. This isn’t a reason to call the local papers (what’s a paper?). Nor does it really even merit a passing mention on a mediocre blog such as this. In short, who gives a shit? But I’m not going to let lack of general interest or importance prevent me from writing something that I think is going to be hilarious. Or at the very least, awesome. Right?
Getting defriended is not at all remarkable. Who among us hasn’t accepted someone’s virtual friendship after meeting them at a bar or a conference or a swingers party, only to completely forget who they are a month later and remove them from your FB friend zoo? But what is noteworthy is getting defriended by someone you see on a regular basis. With whom you believed you were friends. Or at the very least cordial acquaintances. This is what happened to me. Get your tissues out.
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Dear friends, family and other humans,
I am not above begging. And neither is this guy:
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…when you think you’re hilarious, and no one else does.
So these are some clips of the open-mic nights I’ve done at Vermont’s only comedy club, Levity (which means lightness, if you happen to be in third-grade and you weren’t quite sure what that big word meant). As is evidenced by the videos, this shit is hard. I am one lone chuckle away from abject failure. Maybe it has to do with the fact that my voice is about as flat as the Greek economy right now. Seriously, can someone inject some pep into that voice? And also, can someone inject some sort of implant into that chin? I have about a quarter of an inch of chin at the moment. If I get any fatter, it’s going to get swallowed up by my neck.
Anyway, here’s what I’ve been up to as late. Please remember that I’m a beginner. Think of me as an infant trying to punt a field goal or cook a soufflé, and then cut me a break. I’m trying to keep in mind Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000-hour bunk as I do this. So far I’ve got about a half an hour’s worth of practice. Only another 9,999.5 hours until mastery. Encouraging.
12/15/11
12/29/11
1/5/12
1/12/12
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