Cover Your Mouth When You Blog

Open Entreaty to the Guy Sitting Next to Me on the Train, Chuckling to Himself for the Last Seven Stops

Okay, listen. You're starting to make me nervous.

See, when you were sitting across the aisle from me and I first saw you laugh a little, at what I assumed was that really tall guy standing next to the doors who you kept looking at - the one wearing the baggy black and white houndstooth pants and the shiny red pleather loafers - I thought, okay, he's laughing at that guy. That's fine. I mean, those pants are a little funny. I mean, not ha-ha funny, but funny, I suppose. I don't necessarily think it's appropriate to laugh at someone's outfit when they're standing three feet in front of you - unless they're a clown, in which case they would want you to laugh at their outfit, and that guy does sort of look like a clown in the those shoes - but manners aside, I kind of like it when someone lets out a quiet little chortle or an unexpected guffaw when something sort of funny happens on the daily crawl from the Loop to Lincoln Square. Like when it seems the train has stopped at the station and everyone lets go of the rails and then it lurches forward a few inches and everyone's suddenly falling over onto each other, thrown into an awkward embrace with the stranger in front of them. That's kind of funny, if you like that sort of humor. One day last month, when the train made a hasty hop forward at the Armitage stop, this girl wearing pink mittens grabbed a guy's nose to steady herself. Just grabbed it like that's what it was there for. Sort of cupped her hand around the tip of it. She apologized and the guy's cheeks became flush. He had sort of a big nose. That was pretty funny. I locked eyes with a girl standing nearby who'd also witnessed the event and we sort of shared a giggle. It was nice. So, I mean, I like it when something unexpected and kind of funny happens on the train and people break the silent iPod trance to acknowledge that life is happening around them and we're not just a bunch of corporate cyborgs being transported home to plug ourselves into the wall and recharge for tomorrow. So what I'm saying is, I didn't mind when you were sitting across the aisle from me and chuckled a little at that guy with the clown shoes.

But maybe I held your gaze for a moment too long, because then you got up and moved across the aisle to sit next to me. Why? Perhaps you misread my body language. I didn't want to chat or sit close; I just wanted to acknowledge that you were having a small moment of amusement. That's all. Really. And now, it's been nearly eight stops and I still feel the distinct shudder of muzzled laughter vibrating against my right arm. For the first three stops, I thought, okay, maybe he wasn't laughing at the clown shoe guy. Maybe something funny happened earlier in the day and now, in a moment of reflection on the ride home, he's enjoying the joke all over again. That's nice. I like that, too. I like when I can tell that someone's just remembered something really clever that someone said to them that morning and it has cycled through their brain for a second time, inciting a snicker. Or when someone emits a delighted snort while reading their book on the train. I like that. But somewhere around Belmont, you started to glance around the train, wearing a toothy grin, still gyrating in private merriment, and I was almost convinced that you were thinking of the lot of us, Suckers, you don't even know what you got comin'. What are you planning to do? And now, more unsettling, I'm not sure if you're looking out the window or if you're staring right at the side of my face, broad smile and quivering shoulders. Are you going to lick me? Please don't lean over and lick the side of my face, I implore you. (This is me, I know. This is my thing. This fear of a stranger licking my face on the train. I've asked my therapist. She has no idea.)

Are you getting off soon? Please get off. Go home to your clever wife or your cute, little schnauzer - whatever it is that's got you so tickled. In the meantime, please turn your gaze forward. And please, please for the love of all that is holy, please stop laughing. It's making me think you're mentally unbalanced. And if you are mentally unbalanced, please get off soon. I need to relax the rest of the ride home. Maybe I'll think of this on the train to work tomorrow morning and chuckle to myself, but right now, you're making me really nervous.

In a Cab After Three Pinot Noirs

The city looks different from a taxi gliding down the highway. Like a synopsis of itself.

The Sears Tower, where nine years ago, on a trip with friends from Kansas, I pressed my forehead to the window of the observation deck and said, "I've never seen so many things all at once," and Justin put his hand on the small of my back. I wanted him because he wanted me and when I went to Spain that summer for a study abroad program, I only thought of him when I saw a Jeep the same color as his parked outside a carnival in a beach town called Peñiscola. For a moment I missed his mattress on the floor in his room in the attic of that creeky, white house he lived in on 6th Street. In the cab I think of the morning we startled awake to find a triangle-shaped section from the stained glass window next to his bed had crashed to the floor. I picked it up and a shard dug into the top of my index finger. He pulled it out with a pair of tweezers. "Why'd you pick up a piece of broken glass?" he asked.

The cab passes a church in Bucktown and I think baroque, remembering that I learned what that word meant that summer in Spain. And I want to be back there, on Diagonal Street in Barcelona, when I was suddenly opened to the vastness of the world and the beauty of so many people living in one place, on top of each other. When it seemed there was time to waste on men who didn't matter and reason to pick up a piece of violet glass because it was glinting, fractured and lucent in the morning sun. When it seemed possible to view things from a distance, appreciating them for their allure and possibility, no need yet to examine the finer details, their role in the bigger picture.

But I see my city now from the highway, zipping past in a cab and I have that feeling again of seeing so many things all at once, but now they are almost a decade of my life. And the cab exits onto blocks that tell whole stories - months and years that I've lived, walking the sidewalks, unlocking the front doors, changing with each neighborhood and moving on. And it seems that so many parts of this city mean something to me now - the streets filling in with significance like a massive and Byzantine crossword puzzle - but there are still lines gaping with empty squares. And I wonder what the future holds for me here, with the past intersecting at every corner.

Hairitage

I've been tagged by EEK to identify five things you don't know about me. Because I feel that EEK's hair potential has been stunted by unimaginative hair stylists ("No layers, no bangs, no mullet-shaped awesomeness," she's been told) and I believe in every citizen's inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of bangs that whisp across one's forehead just so, here are five things you don't know about my hair:

1) In the third grade, inspired by Madonna, I wanted lots of ear piercings and short, curly hair. Because my mom said more than one ear piercing would make me look like "I don't know, a certain type of girl," one hole in each ear had to suffice. Undeterred, I donned lace leggings and got my long, straight locks cut and permed at "The Hairitage" in our small town. The next day at school, my boyfriend Chad said I looked like a clown and dumped me. He was a jerk and wanted to make out with me several years later (once my hair (and breasts) grew out), but photographic evidence from the time proves his Bozo assessment was spot on.

2) In the fifth grade, inspired by - I don't know, Uncle Jesse? - I got an unironic mullet.  Strangely, this was not a traumatic hair experience, as the mullet was all the rage in Southeast Kansas at the time. It would take me a year and a half to fully grow out the sides.

3) At a "field party", which, for the uninitiated, means literally, a party in a field somewhere in the country because you and your friends have been run out of the Pizza Hut parking lot (your preferred hang out) in high school, someone threw an unopened can of Coors Light into a bonfire, which eventually exploded, sending a smoldering shard of aluminum into my hair, burning off a quarter-sized chunk at the root. I left for college that fall and the small spike of hair on the top left side of my head served as a sort of battle scar, indigenous to those from small towns, very intriguing to my freshman year roommate from Madison,WI, who'd never been to a field party.

4) A couple of years ago, while reading an article about mercury contamination in most of the world's sea life and the residual negative effects it has on humans who consume it, I had a sudden flash of memory - Me at age seven, standing on the pink and white tile in the bathroom in my childhood home, watching two liquid, metallic balls roll down the sink drain. I'd held the thermometer under hot water - presumably to convince my mother I was too sick to go to church - and when I put it in my mouth, it cracked open. Unsure whether the mercury had actually been in my mouth, or had just rolled down the sink, or if I'd actually swallowed a ball of it, or if the memory had only been a dream - one of those hazy recollections that seem improbable over time - I became excessively preoccupied with the idea of having ingested a significant amount of mercury at a young age. This manifested in a Google search for at-home mercury testing kits, which could be ordered from the University of North Carolina in conjunction with a scientific study on the presence of mercury in the general population, which cost $25 and required a fairly significant hair sample cut a quarter inch from the root, which I accidentally sheared from the very spot on my head from which all my hair grows - that center part that all your hair swirls around - resulting in a short patch of hair that could not be combed down, despite determined efforts and the use of several hair-taming products. When my hair stylist asked, "What happened here?" I had to explain the whole story, revealing to her yet another of my neuroses. (My mercury level came back well below what would be considered toxic.)

5) Despite its checkered past, my hair is my favorite physical part of myself. It is thick and has a nice sheen. It grows quickly and has just the right amount of natural curl. It has been long, short, curly, straight, blonde, red, red with blonde highlights, brown, dark brown, dark brown with red and blonde highlights and through all the cuts, colors and testing for heavy metals, it has remained faithful - my happy accomplice in quick identity changes and fanciful whims - reflecting changes in outlook and things unspoken, assuring me that I am healthy, life is long, and that all mistakes and wounds can be rectified over time.

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I'm tagging TJ, Deezee and Wendy to tell us five things we didn't know we were dying to know about them. Anybody else want to share?

Footnote: Though I find it sad that EEK's adventurous hair fancies have been cut short, the girl cuts her own hair and it looks fantastic.

Stage II or Mentally Constructing a Melodramatic Future Blog Post While Watching a Rock Show

First there's Denial and then there's Anger.

Anger that I'm thinking of you tonight because I realized the band I've come to see is the same band that sat next to us at that wedding I went to with you two years ago and you said, "That's The Ponys at the table on our left," and I whispered, "Really?" and stole glances at the girl guitarist as she cut her vegan hotdog into bite-sized pieces. A hipster wedding, replete with ironic 80's music for the walk down the aisle and an officiant wearing a too small thrift store suit with an orange jacket and butterfly collared shirt that a girl in the bathroom said was untucked because the zipper on his pants had split. Anger that you wouldn't dance with me after dinner, not even to the slow songs. Anger that when your friend with the longish black hair who restores old furniture and makes soy ice cream in his free time asked what I did for a living and I told him, you said, "It pays the bills."

Anger that I recognize the beautiful girl taking pictures of the band from the right side of the stage and her husband standing next to her and that I want to say Hi, but I can't remember his name, because you only introduced us once, because people were always too this or too that for you to really be friends with them. Anger that before I met them you said, "They're impressed that you went to Portugal to build a house," and I felt a zing in my chest, struggling to tamp down the tiny voice inside that wanted to ask, "Did you sound proud when you told them? Do you think I've done something good? Important?" Anger that I always thought the answer was no.

Anger that every time I mentioned inviting another couple over for dinner, that couple you knew and we'd met for drinks, the couple with the guy with the same first name as me, you always said, "They'd probably be happy just going out somewhere," or "But what would we cook?" And I'd say, "I'd like to have them over to my new place though," and "We have that recipe for Ropa Vieja and we could make mojitos." When I ran into that couple when you weren't with me they said, "Congrats on your new place!" and the girl hugged me. Anger that she said, "J said it's very "adult" looking." And I laughed and said, "That's a weird thing to say." Anger that I realized later that you didn't want this couple, both public service lawyers, to see how much money I made. You didn't want them to see the Crate & Barrel sofa and the new TV. Anger that you were embarrassed of something I was proud to have accomplished.

Anger that the time you told me a girl in the record store had an engagement ring with a small diamond embedded flush into the band - "She said it only cost $1,200" - and I said I didn't really like that style, you thought that meant I wanted something bigger and more expensive and you called me materialistic. Anger that I knew then that when you felt threatened, when you felt vulnerable, inadequate - by your own standards, not mine - I would be the sacrificial lamb for an ego fractured in childhood. Anger that leaving you was an act of self-preservation.

If you read this you'd be angry. Angry that I have misrepresented you in many ways. Angry that I've left out the tender, loving, accepting, encouraging parts. Angry that I've made myself blameless. But that's the Anger Stage of loss - it doesn't remember. And the reality is, you will never read this. Because you never did. Even when I asked you to. And there's anger about that, too.