Blog #10: I Hope There's Pasta Salad in Hell

2009

 They'd changed the religious billboard by the 24 road overpass again. Before, it had toted an overtly Baptist view on abortion, but now it read “Heaven or Hell: You decide.” with the familiar 1-800 number underneath. Bart and I drove by this billboard every time I took him home after debate practice, and this time he felt particularly goaded. With my cell phone, he dialed the number and waited, me giggling in the driver's seat as I turned onto the overpass.

“Hi.” He starts confidently when the other end picks up. His hair is the same as when we'd first met - medium-length and swept to the side like a prototypical skater kid- and he casually tosses it out of his bright blue eyes. “I'd like to make a decision.” The man on the other end is confused. “Yeah,” Bart continues, smirking as only a 16 year old boy knows how. “Your billboard on 24 road says I need to decide heaven or hell, and I think I want to choose hell.” The man is taken even more off guard. I hypothesize that he doesn't get calls very often, especially of this variety. From Bart's response, I assume the man asks him why he chose hell.

“Well,” Bart reasons, sitting back. “I like really hot weather...” The man at the call center informs him that he is not just hot, but forced to carry our punishments. “Yeah, but aren't most of the trials and stuff exercise related? Like pushing boulders up mountains again and again? I like exercising too, and hot weather, so I don't really see the problem...”

I have no idea how that conversation ended, but I'm sure it was hilarious.

Taylor “Bart” Bartholomew is my best friend, and I hate him sometimes. His favorite food is pasta salad, he has two younger sisters, one that he hates and one that he tolerates, his parents are divorced, and he sometimes talks in third person. He's also a member of the United States Marine Corps, stationed in Afghanistan until June, having first arrived in early January 2012.

His first impression of the middle east was “dusty and cold,” something I knew he was disappointed by, loving the heat and all. Lucky enough for him, things warmed up, and by March it was reaching above 90 degrees every day. The heat isn't so bad, he says, it's the searing hot dust that blows around that really makes his temporary home hard to deal with sometimes.

Blog #9: Eavesdrop-drop-dropping

Dressed in an unassuming deep purple coat, the woman waits at the Maggie's Buns entree display for a good two minutes before speaking up, waving down the hipster twenty-something behind the counter. "What is that entree at the end?" She gestures, in case the verbal description wasn't enough.

He leans over to check, furrowing his brow slightly under the mop of dark hair. "That is..." he leans further before answering "...our veggie pesto wrap."

The woman nods and frowns, considering this. Clearly, it was not the answer she was hoping for, after staring down the food so carefully before. "Is there any protein in that?" I bite my lip, watching the exchange, my stomach quietly moaning.

Now he frowns, his small white ear gauges coming into view as he turns to the display of food again. "I don't- it's mostly just vegetables and pesto." A sheepish shrug, and he turns to face the woman again.

Another wrong answer, it seems. The woman crosses her arms. "Could you fry me up an egg with it?" It sounds condescending, and I feel bad for the hipster. I want to order something simple and on the menu to make up for her.

The hipster is thrown, both by the question and the tone, and he nervously straightens his light blue, "White Castle Employee of the Month 1971" tee-shirt as he formulates an acceptable response. "I'm not sure..." Feet still planted in front of the register, he twists his tall body to peek into the kitchen area behind him. "It depends on how far they are on cleaning..." Stepping away from the counter now, he takes a few paces towards the back, passing briefly through the teal door frame to check on the cleanup progress, desperately trying to help his costumer.

His coworker, a pretty young woman with a thick black ponytail who knows both my name and my order from my many visits, appears. "What's up?" By now, I realize that it's going to be a while before I get to order my usual, so I pull my phone from my jacket pocket and check Twitter while the hipster male employee explains situation to the girl.

I look back up just as she gives the woman an apologetic shrug. "Oh, yeah, we usually stop doing hot sandwiches about two, sorry." The problem is that once the hot sandwiches stop being made, the grill is unnecessary and gets cleaned and prepared for the next day. Thus, no fried egg to accompany the protein-less wrap.

The woman purses her lips, then quickly smiles to show she isn't too upset. "That's alright. What's the one next to it, then?" Again, she gestures.

The hipster walks around the counter to see. "That is our vegan Thai peanut stir fry." Knowing that the peanut sauce is the only protein element in the dish, he doesn't look confident.

The woman nods, hands going into her deep purple coat pockets. "You know, I think I'll take that one."

He looks relieved. "Great! For here or to go?"

She pulls a large, black clutch-style wallet from within her purse with a smile, seemingly just as relieved that the confusion was over. "For here is good." She hands him a credit card.

"Hi, Bri!" The female employee, a smile on her face, peeks from around her male counterpart, who is gratefully ringing up the woman's final order. I smile, say hello back, and order the usual. Quick, simple, and on the menu.

Blog #8: Meet Bryan

The ten minutes before my poetry class starts is the best part of my Monday. The entire class is united against the professor that must not be named, and so we spend the couple minutes before he arrives complaining, making grandiose claims about standing up to him, but mostly just reveling in our united cause. Funny thing is that I don't know any of these people outside of this class one bit, and some I even have trouble remembering names for. It's strange to me that sometimes the people that are really strangers to me are the ones I see every day.

The only boy in the class sits next to me, on the left side of the small classroom. His name is Bryan and all that I know about him, past the unruly ginger mop on his head, is that he comes after me on the attendance sheet.

"Hey, uh, Bryan?" I inquire, fumbling with my iPhone in my pocket. "Do you mind if I interview you for my creative nonfiction class? It's just... I have to interview a stranger and I don't know you so you're basically a stranger..." Great, I'm rambling, I think, but he's already nodding, open to the intrusion. Relieved, I pull the phone all the way out, switching to the camera act.

"I have to take a picture... so... yeah. I'm gonna take an awkward picture of you now." He laughs a little at my awkwardness and I pull out a pen. "So... what's your name?" I raise an eyebrow at myself and he smirks back in understanding. The girl on the other side of me is calculating the possible date for the late midterm- we're almost three weeks behind on the syllabus.

"Bryan with a y, Davis. Bryan Davis." It was good that he pointed out the y. I'd been mentally spelling his name "Brian" because I liked the idea that Brian and Brianna were sitting next to each other. Ah, c'est la vie.

"And what's your major?" I realized at this moment how completely unprepared I was for this interview.

"English lit." He rests his hands on his decomposition book (the environmental equivalent of the composition book, I assume) patiently.

"Cool, cool..." I mutter, writing it down. The girls next to me look over at us, curious. "What do you want to do with that?"

He smiles, almost sheepishly. "I want to teach high school."

I stop writing and raise my eyebrow at him and chuckle, remembering my own reasons for not ever wanting to be a teacher, especially in high school. "Brave. So do you have to go to, like, teacher's school after this?" I pause to mull over my phrasing. "Teacher's school? Did that just come out?"

He laughs again, and nods. "Yeah, a couple years of teacher's school."

I make a forgettable comment to the girl next to me about their midterm reschedule conjecture and then another thought occurs to me. "Why high school?" I ask Bryan, still patiently giving me his full attention.

He shrugs with a thoughtful look. "Just from my own personal experience, I had a lot of great teachers back then and I want to do that too." We make eye contact for a moment, not because we're seeing something in each other, but because we're sharing a trip down memory lane, thinking about all the great high school lit teachers we've had. It only lasts a couple seconds, but I'm glad I interviewed Bryan. He's comfortable with the same kind of quiet reflection that I am, content with silence. I decide that I like Bryan, and hope we have a class together in the future, if only to commiserate about professors that will probably never inspire a love of teaching.

Blog #7: My fear of octopuses is completely and totally rational

Did you know that the male pillow octopus grows to only a few centimeters, while its female counterpart can stretch further than six feet? You go, girl!

But octopuses have more to offer than just an extreme body size. One intelligence trait of the octopus that has been circulating YouTube for a while is their ability to camouflage into almost any background. Their entire bodies are covered with tiny pigmented cells called chromatophores, each of which contain three sacks of colors and are surrounded by muscles that can control how the pigments are displayed by either relaxing or contracting. Think of it like a balloon; when it's loose, the color is small and concentrated, but when you stretch it out the color spreads and expands. A terrifying balloon of death.

Every one of these cells is controlled independently by the nervous system, allowing for an incredible amount of control and complexity for the range of colors. This also means that the octopus can change its appearance in less than a second. As if I wasn't already freaked out enough; not only can an octopus completely envelop me in its arms of death to slowly strangle me as I drown, but it can also sneak up on me, like a lioness waiting patiently for its prey to become complacent.

But enough about my completely rational fear of a slow, horrible death-by-camouflaged-tentacles. Remember the male pillow octopus we talked about earlier, the tiny one? Well, what he lacks in size he makes up for in creativity. These little buggers will rip off the poisonous tentacles of Portuguese man-of-war jellyfish -which they are immune to- and wield them as swords to keep predators at bay. As disturbing as that is -imagine ripping off the arm of one of your enemies and using it to fight off your other enemies- is it wrong that I find this defense mechanism kind of adorable? The things are only a couple centimeters long!

Blog #6: On Hating Twilight

I remember reading Twilight in 8th grade just before its massive popularity hit and loving it. Stephanie Meyer had created a world I was completely able to fall into and roll around in. Then, about a year later, it started getting pretty heavy mainstream attention, and so the haters started to crawl out from under their angry rocks, ready to sink their teeth into something freshly beloved. No vampire pun intended.

Twilight hating became, almost overnight, the sport of choice for "intellectuals", all of whom cited its anti-feminist protagonist, its borderline abusive love interest, and its less-than-stellar writing style. While I can offer plenty of arguments debunking those concerns, that's not what's so interesting about the fad of hating Twilight.

What's interesting to me is that it happened to Twilight, and not to one of the hundreds of adult romance novels whose entire genre is essentially subjugating at least one gender for sexual purposes- and I am including men. Yes, Twilight was more popular than many other romance novels, but its haters have almost created an entire social movement around the dislike of one silly book series.

There are many books in this world, and arguably many far worse than Twilight. In fairness, Kristen Stewart hasn't done much to help the negative view of the series, but even before the wildly popular movies premiered, the hatred was almost louder than the love.

I suppose my biggest question about the fad is this, though. With all the things in the world to spend energy hating, why Twilight?

On Sexist Jokes

A man is driving and runs over a woman. Who is at fault?
...
The man, because what was he doing driving in a kitchen??

Hi, my name is Bri (hi Bri!) and I'm a female who laughs at sexist jokes. I can't help it- they're so absurdly offensive that they actually throttle past the "offensive" line and end up at funny. Obviously I don't find these jokes funny when the "comedian" actually believes the sentiment, but when it's me and a couple friends and someone cracks a kitchen joke, I'm going to laugh. And I'm going to laugh hard.

I don't find sexist jokes funny because I'm an anti-feminist, or because I believe my gender's rightful place is in front of a stove, let's be clear. No, I love sexist jokes because it forces people to, frankly, chill the fuck out.

Let me explain. I believe that if you can't laugh at something, then you don't completely understand it. I believe that cracking jokes about something is just as valuable a coping mechanism as "roaming the halls weeping" (thanks, Spock!). Laughter reminds us that through every horrible event there comes a reason to continue living. Joking about touchy or controversial topics is just a way of dealing with them, because yes, sexism is funny. It is honestly hysterical to me when one person believes they're inherently better because of the set of genitals they lucked into prenatally. And how do I express that opinion? By satirically telling jokes to point out how imbecilic their points-of-view are. I would much rather laugh than yell, would rather smile than sob, and would rather spread entertainment than hate.

I laugh at sexist jokes because if I yelled and protested over every sexist, bigoted, or hateful thing someone makes light of, I would never get to sleep. I laugh at sexist jokes because they're funny, and because laughter is the best medicine for a fractured world. I laugh because, well, why not?

What They Don't Tell You About College

What they don't tell you about college is that it smells awful in the dorms. None of the pamphlets prepared me for the stench of genitals wafting through the hallways every morning, or the way your pillow always manages to smell like feet no matter how often you wash it. It might have been nice to be prepared for the fact that people apparently don't find it in their hearts to remove their own wads of public hair from the shower drains, or that sometimes the janitors just ignore it for weeks on end. But maybe that's just me.

What they don't tell you about college is that no matter how much you hated wherever you lived before, you're going to miss it at some point. For me, the word "hate" is too mild. Public school was not kind to me; I was bullied consistently from the time I was 8 on through my high school graduation, and being smart didn't get very far socially, even with the smart kids. My town was four hours away from any substantial city, and was encased in a valley in the Rocky Mountains, so feeling like you were caught in an empty fish bowl wasn't far off from the truth. It rarely rained, the foliage was sparse and usually parasitic, and the summers were so dry your hands looked like they were covered in flesh-colored scales. But it was familiar, and familiarity is few and far between 1000 miles from where you grew up.

What they don't tell you about college is that it's nothing like what you'd expected, but you can't imagine a better way to spend the first four years of your adulthood. About halfway through my first semester, as a freshman, I seriously considered dropping out and getting a service industry job to pay the bills while I penned the next great American novel. That first semester I was taking all core classes, and I had a grand total of one friend who was only really my friend because neither of us had met anyone else yet, and I couldn't remember ever feeling more completely alone. But for all the genital stench, all the unexpected homesickness, and all the grandiose expectations of my fabulous college life, I can honestly say that college has made me a better person. I am no longer that angry, deeply wounded kid who left Colorado with a chip on her shoulder and an empty glass. I am now an angry, on-the-mend young adult who stays out until 4am to go for a walk with someone she barely knows, washes dishes for two hours to film a silly cooking video with her roommates, and writes slam poetry about peeing standing up and being an angry, on-the-mend young adult. And honestly, who could ask for anything more out of their college experience?

Blog #3: My First Kiss and the subsequent cliches therein

He wasn't going to do it. My dad was picking me up any minutes, the darkened windows of Barnes and Nobles leered from behind us, we'd been out here alone for two hours, and he wasn't going to do it. From beyond the windows I imagined the protagonists from all my favorite books rolling their black-and-white eyes. Right. Before my brain got in the way, I spoke up.

"Mike. Look up." I commanded, in a tone I hoped wasn't as aggressive as it probably was. His head was bent, looking down at the sliver of concrete between us, the bookstore looking on impassively.

He did look up, but turned his face away from me, curiously gazing across the street, away from the impatient audience beyond the glass panes.

"No, Mike." I breathed, trying not to let my exasperation- hardly a romantic emotion- show. "Look at me."

Slowly, as if he knew what was coming, my fifteen-year-old boyfriend rotated his whole body back in my direction. As soon as the path to his face was clear, I initiated what I've since named the "kiss attack" strategy. I scrunched my eyes closed comically, mentally calculated the direction I needed to move, and shoved my face forward, hoping to God he didn't move his mug.

I don't remember how long it was, just that the panic slowly ebbed away to relief. The first kiss. It was over.

What I do remember was that it was soft, unlike the spines of the books lined up neatly past where our faces were mashed together awkwardly. I had braces and he looked like Sid the Sloth, and his mouth was soft. The taste, if there was one, didn't make an impression, and all I could smell was cold cement and Mike's own dissipating fear, but the one thing that I know without a shadow of a doubt was that it
was
soft.
And that Alanna the Lioness, cackling from the pages of her many volumes inside the store, would have been so damn proud.


...I'm not sure I succeeded; there weren't a lot of concrete options to choose from for this particular scene.

Blog #2: Little (Big) Lie

I don't remember ever lying to my parents before high school. I mean, I'm sure I did, but it was never about big stuff, or about stuff that was statistically significant to my memory, apparently. But I lied to my teachers a lot in middle school, because I was used to being given free reign over my education from elementary school (they were really good about challenging "gifted" students, a category I fell into for a good portion of my childhood) and middle school was throwing off my groove.

And that's why I found myself, still flinchy about swear words at 13, handing Mr. Baker a forged note to get me out of SNT. He glanced at it, glanced up at me, and I literally felt my hands shaking and my upper lip beginning to perspire. As he studied the curves of the fake signature my forearm twitched, as if it wanted to snatch the note back and apologize and never do anything so stupid again. I wasn't used to rebellion. This was too much. I had to-

"Ok. Go on." He nodded at me but kept the note and went back to grading papers.

I-I got away with it? AWESOME! As I walked away from the classroom, I mentally gave a passionate middle finger to the SNT class growing smaller and smaller behind me.

SNT was "Student Needs Time", or basically study hall in which you were graded on your apparent effort. Doing homework (or, really, writing anything for 45 minutes, even if it was just the word "fuck" over and over again because no teacher ever actually checked) got you an A for the day, reading a book got you a B, and on and on down the line. I never had stuff to do during SNT because I often finished homework during class, and I always had a book to read because I was such a fast worker and needed something to do with the approx. two hours of waiting around I did per day for the rest of the class to finish up. SNT was not my friend, and I was not giving up my 4.0 for a glorified study hall class.

Next bit of context: At the time, I was in a class called "Production Tech." I honestly have no idea what the actual purpose of that class was, since I spent most of it in the computer lab, blogging on my new website. I think we were supposed to be filming and editing the morning video announcements, which weren't as daily as they were meant to be, as I remember. A kid named Keenan, who was friends with some new friends of mine, was in charge of editing said not-so-daily daily videos, in a cramped little black room with archaic analog editing machines. Sometimes, when editing didn't get finished during production tech, which it often didn't because of how long it took with the editing machines from the 1700s, Keenan and whoever else was involved in that day's episode could get a note excusing them from SNT to finish up.

Further (and final) context: Production tech was "taught" by a rather detatched teacher named Ms. Greb, who never monitored the editing room, during class, SNT, or otherwise. In fact, I don't remember a single occasion when she set foot in the room at all. She wasn't detached enough to sign any note we wanted her to, though, but luckily her signature, which we had several copies of, was easy to forge.

So for the rest of the year, unless I actually had homework to do, I'd forge myself a note and hang out in the editing room, reading.

There wasn't much sensory detail in that, but it's the earliest lie I can remember. Looking back, that was the nerdiest bit of rebellion ever. I forged notes from my teacher not to smoke, or get high, or whatever else kids forge notes for, but to read in peace without my SNT grade suffering. Pathetic. I don't think I have to analyze that any further because this anecdote pretty much speaks for itself. I AM A NERD.

Blog #1: A Study in Swing Sets

It's hard to chronologically sort memories from before you were old enough to know what "chronologically" meant. It's even harder when you aren't in school and don't have those handy grades to keep the dates straight in your mind. But if I were to venture a guess, I'd say my earliest memory was when I was two or three years old, in a Seattle preschool. I don't remember the preschool itself, really. I remember there being rows of tiny desks and a basket of oranges, but both of those details could have been completely reconstructed from reading about kids going to preschool later on. What I actually remember is this: a tire swing in front of a small wooden building surrounded by giant trees, connected to society by only a long, isolated road. I also remember swinging on that tire swing set, waiting for my mom to pick me up. But mostly it's just that image of a tire swing, gently rocking in the wind of the Pacific Northwest, in the middle of a dense copse of trees, in front of a little preschool.

As for the rest of the questions, there isn't really much of this memory to call creative non-fiction, but I don't think I'd have a problem with that label. I asked my mom, and she admits that there was a tire swing in front of my first preschool, so that much was true, although she's not sure where the "stranded in the forest" part came from. Either way, the important part of the memory, the swing set, was true, and that's good enough for me.

To a point, I agree with Joan Didion that "if you remember it, it's true." If the detail in question isn't an important factor in the point of a memory, and it just serves to better remark upon you as the rememberer (apparently that's not a word.... whatever), then sure, it's true. Obviously, making up a car accident or the death of a relative is pretty important in the shaping of a story, and at that point I wouldn't consider it non-fiction, creative or not. But in class some people didn't like that one author grouped three friends into one person for the purposes of her story and to lessen the "real-world" impact on the people mentioned, and I disagree with them. I don't think that was such a big deal, for two reasons.
1. The story isn't about her friends, it's about her. It doesn't matter who else is going through this as long as it doesn't change the circumstances of the story for the person the story is meant to be about.
2. I can empathize with the author not wanting to implicate or hurt her friends more than she has to. As a blogger, I've had to change names or sometimes even leave chunks of stories out in order to protect the people who make appearances in said stories. Telling the truth is important, but if it's at the expense of all your friends and family, then is absolute, total truth worth it? We don't all have the freedom of Frank McCourt had, waiting for his mother to die before publishing his story.

ICJ: Early memory of the death of an animal

Hello! Although this is not technically a prompt meant to be put on the blog, I thought I'd use this platform to collect all the writings I do throughout the semester in one place online. Unless things become a bit too personal with the in-class-journal (ICJ), which I can't really imagine, I'll be posting all the writing I do for creative nonfiction here on this blog. You're welcome. (har. har.)

I don't exactly remember why we got chickens in the first place. Whenever we'd stop by the feed store to pick up goat good in the springtime, we would always play with the baby chicks in their warm, well lit cardboard boxes, but our yard wasn't really a farm yard.

One year, on Easter, however, we bought two. One, a tiny half-dead rooster I called Easter (fitting, I know) and one strong, healthy hen my brother named Twister, for his favorite movie.

We'd only had them for a year or two when I woke up one cold December morning and found a somber dad and brother at the kitchen table. Apparently, that morning, they'd found pieces of the two animals strewn around the backyard. Twister's carcass they eventually found- all we had left of Easter were large clumps of feathers. He'd put up more of a fight, it seemed. I cried for a good hour, assuming correctly that the murderer was one of those bastard stray cats, tearing down from my walls anything even remotely feline. Granted, there wasn't much, aside from a fake award for "Most Motivated" with a grinning clip art kitty at the top, but I tore it down anyways. Then I took to my journal and drew a graphic illustration of myself murdering said murderer cat.

(That's when Prof. Johnson told us to stop writing. If I'd had more time, maybe I would have talked about how even though Easter looked half-dead as a chick, he grew up to be an adorable little man, with pale yellow and jet black feathers puffing him up like the proud rooster he was. I could have also talked about how his feet, instead of being stick-like and scaly, were covered with those same feathers, making it look like he was constantly wearing a pair of flamboyant flared pants. Maybe I might have mentioned how I could pick him up with one hand and carry him about the yard with me as I did my chores, or how Twister would drink wads of spit off the sidewalk and crickets we threw in her direction, or how Easter used to pick fights with the goats and refused to back down until human intervention, or how even after they died I spread chicken seed around their old house in mourning. Or maybe I wouldn't have mentioned any of that. Who knows.)