another boring romantic that's me

I never thought I would live in a town as small as this. As I was walking to the Farmer's Market this morning, Sonya and Mike drove past and picked me up in their little car. We shared a brief chat until they dropped me off across from the wildflowers of the market. Inside, I ran into Michael playing upright bass, Danny buying strawberries, and my thesis director all wild-haired and summery. On the way home, I ran into my hair stylist, taking down the "no parking" signs he'd made out of poster-board and stuck up in his windows to ward off the Farmer's Market crowd. He used to cut hair for John Cougar Mellencamp and his model wife (who live in this small town), and now he cuts mine. Cheap and amazing. Yesterday I turned on WFHB, Bloomington community radio, and who should be the DJ but the director of the Creative Writing program. I recognized her by her voice. She played the new Portishead. Whenever I do anything outside, such as holding class by the art museum's red doughnut sculpture, or tacking up signs for a yard sale, multiple people call me later to say that they saw me. The local bar really is the proverbial place where everybody knows your name.

It gets cloying at times, and I'm definitely ready to move on. Still, I'm so grateful, now that it's ending, to have known what this life is like. The kind of self you inhabit in a small town is as real, but in an inverted way, from that you inhabit in the anonymity of a big city. In the latter, I feel isolated from the buzz and thrust, and therefore myself in a solitary, observant way. In the former, you are forced into being yourself, because you are always apt to run into someone when you least feel like performing. The trade-off is that, since you get those sides of others too, there's only so much resentment you can feel about being caught in your dirtiest shirt or weeping in public.

And when you begin to notice that half-chewed corn husks or cloth flowers begin to appear regularly on your porch and lawn, you can't help but imagine that the person leaving them is well aware exactly for whom they are intended.

though i said i'd go before us and show the way back home

Vanessa is leaving tomorrow morning. I've been cleaning all weekend, except for a few hours late night during which we had a spectacular meal at Restaurant Tallent, the local haute cuisine slow food organic food restaurant. Pictures of our meals as soon as I dump my camera's contents into my computer, but let me just say that it included a strawberry rosewater "milkshake." Afterwards we saw the new Indiana Jones, which was campy in all the right ways and thoroughly enjoyable. That spitfire Karen Allen was so much fun and we agreed that Cate Blanchett can do no wrong.

So now I'm bleached out and exhausted and listening to the 4-hour mix I made for V's road trip. My house is an echo chamber with the furniture gone. My library and bedroom are full of everything I own. Leaving has become at once quite real and quite unfathomable.

i will miss soma

Overheard: "I ate some gator and it was pretty good."

yard sale days

V called me both Anne of Green Gables and Pollyana yesterday, the former when I was rhapsodizing over the moon, hanging full and white in a pinkishly blue twilight, swooped across by bats. The latter when I was opining over the unexpected merit of yesterday's yard sale: seeing stuff I've toted around idly for years walk off with people who loved it more than I ever could. A few of these:

• The hot vintage dress with the beautiful floral print that doesn't fit right went with a sweet hipster girl.
• The cheerleader doll altered so that her uniform reads "punk" goes away with a polite little girl who helped her young friends find their own spoils.
• The futon -- my first long-term post-college bed -- to an English PhD student.
• The green velvet throne chair to another English PhD student I randomly see around all the time but haven't ever officially met.
• The hot shoes and yellow shirt I never wear to my friend Sherri.
• The little red wok and pretty bowls I bought in Providence right after college to my mentee in the CW program - a young Mainer just post-college herself.
  
• The necklace from the Silver Dragon to the beautiful woman with the facial tattoo who has waited on me often at a local cafe. Her stunning child with a chest of pirate booty slung round his neck and cascading curls wandered around wielding Chris's curtain rod like a sword.

All in all, it was a pretty good day. Not as bustling as we'd hoped, but satisfying.

soon i will never have to listen to the bakehouse girls again

A gaggle of sorority girls congregated near V and me as we tried to work today. Girls like this come to this cafe all the time and are rude to the waitstaff, loud and overbearing, mean to their absent friends, and generally disruptive. V and I exacted our final revenge by riffing on their outbursts over gchat. Here is an excerpt of our mockery. It's sort of found mockery if you will, since most of the language came from the girls themselves. If you would like the whole text please see her blog. I warn you, this is entirely gratuitous frustration born of four years of dealing with overpriveleged 20 year-olds. Please do not think the less of me:

VM: they are SO RUDE here

me: oh my gawd

2:18 PM VM: I like asked for a sandwich with no fat in it

and like this turkey HAS FAT

like WTF?

me: OH MY GAWD you ARE SO OPPRESSED

VM: I know, right?

vegan cocunut curry soup over rice

I'm at Rachel's Cafe, where I've never been before. If I were going to stay in Bloomington I would come here all the time. Some kind of local theater production is about to go up and festively dressed children are standing about while a young man is shouting "yay" at regular intervals in that monotone of excitement peculiar to gentle nonprofiteers.

Please go read Mary Austin Speaker's wonderful article and ogle Kramer O'Neill's starkly lush photo essay for Last Exit Magazine, "Remains of the Day." The collaborative piece explores an Altoona, PA Taxidermy Convention.

Good News

Laura Van den Berg's story "Where We Must Be" from Indiana Review 29.1 (my first issue as Fiction Editor) has been selected for inclusion in Best American Nonrequired Reading 2008! Marjorie Celona's "Y" from IR 28.2 has also been selected for the same issue. Congratulations Laura and Marjorie!

poor boys and pilgrims

I'm back from Oklahoma City. Tracy's wedding was beautiful and moving. On the way, V and I stopped at Graceland. On the whole, it was sad mostly because it felt so real, so lived in. Even though Tim Gunn would say that he questioned the taste level of the designers of Graceland, and everything there is so over-the-top it, what was most striking was how clear it was that people had actually inhabited the space. Paintings that seemed done by someone's uncle in the vicinity of ceramic chimps. A kitchen range that seemed used across the hall from green shag carpet. A carport that looked like anyone's carport. Vanessa and I remarked on the racial stratification of the employees - the inside workers were predominately white, the outside predominately African American. After leaving Graceland we ate some tasty barbecue and later stayed in a small town in Arkansas where people stared at the road from seas of belongings under shelters and packs of dogs slept on the yard of boarded up elementary schools. Here are some of the striking patterns of Graceland.