Happiness is a Warm New Thing
Ah, the ways to spend money you don’t have without thinking about it. There’s buying a present for someone. Fourteen-ninety-five for a paperback at Walden’s; a paperback and see, it’s one of these books that like, totally changed your life and you know it will blow the recipient’s mind away so there’s nothing but good feeling and smiles as you whip out your credit card.

There’s the iced coffee(2.50) and cappuccino(2.95) for you and your father, respectively, on the way back from the visit one morning to the county prison where his student is interning. It was something about the four-concrete walls that the place boils down to in the end, together with the overcrowding with people who are really just mentally ill, the overmedicating of all and the resultant hopelessness of the administrative staff. Something about those things causing you to want a beverage that was both extravagant and caffeinated on the way home. For you and him to have the very beverages of your choice, and then to drink them while driving the rest of the way home with all the windows cranked wide open to summer’s excessive verdancy and air and light.

There’s the fancy salad (6.50) plus 82-ounce bottle of water (.85) at the Whole Check Natural Foods store on your first real weekday sans job (save a freelancing gig.) And the chick mag (5.50) to read while eating. Salad’s good for you, though. And that magazine was one of them-there quasi-feminist dealies, so that’s, like, sticking with your core values, there.

Then there’re the Necessary Expenses for the Moving. The sofa bed for your new teeny-tiny apartment – how smart!- that you bought at Swedish Four-Letter-Word store that pimps itself as being All Things Necessary. It’s the Real Simple magazine of the shopping world; you feel smart for spending 350 bucks there. That Muktajk (®) slipcover was a hundred dollars off! You fucking saved! Space *and* money! Pat on the back fer you!

These are a few of the expenses I’ve incurred in the week since I was dropped from the payroll at Small Publication. Which amount to way more than most any given week when I was on it.

Current Contemplated Future Ways of Spending Money I Don’t Have:
Haircut w/ favorite hairdresser
Eating out yummy Ethiopian food one last time before I leave Atlanta
Getting an airport card for this here computadora

The Other Side of You.
Greetings from Pittsburgh.

I’ve spent all weekend hanging out with my extended family here in the house I grew up in, which is wonderful and rare.

I just ate a dinner of lasagna and red wine with nieces, sister and madre, which was just lovely.

And now, all have dispersed for a while: my sister, next door with nieces at the neighbor’s pool, my mother, down in the basement doing laundry and probably sneaking a cigarette.

I am alone, alone, alone, right now. This is, perhaps, the best of all.

Because sometimes it’s as if the more I love people, the happier I am in those times of briefest respite when they’ve gone away. I anticipate and enjoy the rare family get-together - but I’m happiest when I’m in the next room over, with a good book or magazine. I can hear everyone laughing and talking but know that I won’t be called upon to engage.

When I was little I used to hide under tables or in hallways just outside living rooms and dining rooms. I was so much younger than everyone else; it was easy to be invisible if I was quiet. And people appreciate a quiet child. The sweetest reward was to hear my relatives wonder aloud in sort of an idle way at where I was. I would never reveal myself. And no one would bother me. It’s as if I could enjoy their company and feel their affection without having to deal with being with them.

Which again, is definitely not to say I love the people I love less than you do, Henshaw. I think this is just how it is to be an introvert.

Which is weird to say, because much of my behavior as an adult cannot be described as introverted. I hardly ever actually feel shy. I mean, I go up to people and talk with them for a damn living. Which is maybe why times like this feel like such a vacation. To be home with family, but not strangled by anyone’s attention. To know I’m loved but not be required to demonstrate, or get confirmation. To have space.

Lookin’ fer Love
I can now, quite happily go a long, long time without seeing a “For Rent” sign. And that might be too soon. This weekend I got to experience that uniquely depersonalizing process of Apartment Hunting on a Low Income in a New Town. You start out with a clear idea of what you want, but then by the end of Day One, you might find yourself pacing two rooms that smell unambiguously of dog pee with a northern exposure that faces the wall of another house, thinking, “Maybe I could do this. Could I do this? Maybe I could do this.” By the end of Day Two, the clouds clear as if by magic and you find The Place, but there’s always that Day One to go through. In my case, Day One was actually three days, but I’ll just give you the highlights.

First, let me explain the conflict: I want my own place. I’ve lived with roommates for about two years. Before that, I lived with a boyfriend for about three years. The only time I’ve ever lived alone is before that, for about a year. Now I’m almost thirty and I’m tired of sharing cabinet space with people I’m not sleeping with and worrying about whether it’s okay to eat someone else’s browning banana. I’m tired of feeling resentful about sweeping and making sure everyone’s cool with the picture I want to hang in the living room. I’m a grown-up. I want my own place.

Trouble is, as a teaching assistant I’ll take a significant pay cut from my current extravagant nonprofit salary at Small Publication. I’m not really technically sure I can afford to live alone in Beach Town while I go to school. But god damn it, I told myself last Thursday night as I rolled up my sleeves to open the classifieds section of the Beach Town Observer, I’m going to fricking try.

Take One
I actually made a first visit to do this about a month ago. Marshall came with me to drive as I wrote down phone numbers on “For Rent” signs and to take photos of places with his digital camera. He thought that up. Isn’t he smart? So anyway. We went, I found a place I liked, we returned to Atlanta and the very next day, I got a phone message from landlord of said cute-place. The current tenant, he said, who was living there on a month-to-month lease and who was kind of an aimless human being in his opinion, had decided she was gonna stay “three or eight more months; she’s not sure.” He was so sorry. He sounded sorry. He really wanted me to move in, he said. Hm, I thought, and well. So do I. Too bad there’s not anyone with like, the authority to make this thing happen. Somebody who was a landlord there or something.

Standards, people.
This trip, I decided to start searching on a weekday, since that meant I could work with a realty company rather than dealing with signs put in yards by random people who had no idea what they were doing. It seemed I’d encounter a higher degree of competence and possibly, nicer places by going with the pros. See, I know that while I’m slightly poor right now and beggars can’t choose jackshit and all that, I still have certain ideals.

Number One being: Live somewhere with character. No apartment complexes with thirty buildings that all look eerily similar surrounding a sad little three-foot swimming pool. No and hell no and hell no and no. I’m more likely to sign a lease on a freaky cockroach-infested hole in the basement of a big, crazy house constructed in the nineteen-teens over a nice, clean box where I’m sandwiched in by forty-eight other identical nice, clean boxes– because, you see, the crap place has the cutest little antique stove. I’ve made such choices before. Call it a quirk.

Ideally, I’d love to live in Beach Town’s a ridiculously gorgeous historic neighborhood where they actually film movies that call for people in top-hats to ride along in horse-drawn buggies down cobblestone streets dripping with Spanish moss. And it’s right around the corner from downtown, where there are coffee shops and a farmer’s market on Saturdays. I have pictured myself writing in an actual garret there, one that I’d rent out from some nice, affluent family. Maybe they’d invite me down for dinner every now and then and I’d walk their Great Danes on Sunday mornings. I’d bring them blueberries from the man selling them on the corner and they’ make pie and invite me down for some with cinnamon ice cream. Or there was this other neighborhood with amazing houses where all the old, affluent hippies live. I’d like to live there. I’m very comfortable around old, affluent hippies, you see. Ah. Affluence.

Anyway. So I thought that maybe someone there would be more likely to list his or her carriage apartment with the hardwood floors and the surplus of natural light with the town’s main realty company, Isle Shores, than by just sticking a “For Rent” sign in the yard.

Compartment for Rent, or: Beige is the new Suicide.
So we go to Isle Shores’ main office downtown. Find three apartment-listings that look hopeful. And here, we meet Sven, the chain-smoking agent who does a piss-poor job at hiding his exasperation at spending his Friday with a prospective renter from whom he makes no commission. When we first meet him, he directs all conversation to Marshall only, until Marshall says, “I’m not renting. She is.”
We visit three places:
1.An apartment on the second floor of a four-floor complex. On the walk over, Sven asks me, to my annoyance, “Are you sure you can afford this place?” I am indignant with my Yes-!
The place is a bit boring, with a cute courtyard. It is, however, slightly out of my price range.

2. An apartment built into the second floor of one of the Historic District houses. We went inside and I immediately swooned over the bedroom, just off the entrance. Wide, shiny hardwood floors the exact hue of a bay mare! Giant windows! Bathroom with claw foot tub! Then we go back into the rest of the place, which consists of one room with a kitchen counter jammed into one corner. There’s beige carpeting and cheap, water-stained wallpaper. At noon, it’s late-afternoon dim. It also comes furnished, I read now in the rental-packet, which means I get a wet-smelling couch, a set of cheap kitchen implements including someone else’s pots and pans - and a mammoth plywood entertainment center-thing that takes up one entire wall. This includes one of those ancient Kenwood stereo-system cabinets with the glass door – you know, the kind you used to see on the side of the road following garage sales ten years ago? I’m told I’m not allowed to move or get rid of any of these objects. This is also the place that smells of dog pee.

3. On the edge of town, there’s a house. Not bad looking. A ranch-style house in a working class neighborhood with few trees. If you walk down the driveway to this house and through the carport, through the gate of the metal fence and down the dirt path, there’s free-standing garage with a second story. This second story is an apartment. An apartment that is: a strange little hallway, a bedroom, living room and kitchen. I ask Sven who lives in the main house. He shrugs, takes his cigarette from his mouth, “Renters. They are renters.” There are three more houses on the garage apartment’s other sides. There is also a streetlight that’s aimed at what would be my kitchen and living room windows. Sven tells me I would get use of the garage below. For anything I wanted.

Marshall says later, that this is the apartment where they’d find a writer dead, weeks later, from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. And this is how it is, this weekend. Both nights in Beach Town, I fell into bed and my sleep was pure blackness. It’s exhausting to imagine yourself into all these lives: to think, “Now, where would I put the end table my father made? Where would the litter box go?” And it’s flat-out depressing to do this in places so squalid and sad. If someone suggests you might live somewhere, the thin line that makes up your own judgment can blur when you’re short on cash and that person is also telling you, “This one will go fast.”

This, too: If shoebox apartment complexes feel soulless and anonymous, apartments constructed out of the corners of buildings with wholly different original purposes have the potential to depress. Doorways spackled shut and new walls cravenly shoved into place, delineating exactly six-hundred-dollars’ worth of living space; no more, no less, sign here; these things, they are sad. To pull into the driveway of my friend’s house where we were staying on Friday night felt like a return to open air and to breathing. A house, made to be lived in, not profited from – a house with real, generous rooms and high ceilings. To look at and to walk around in and to sit and stand and breathe and touch. Kitchen. Bedroom. Living room.

I was so tired of looking at apartments forced into other spaces that at five-o-clock that day, I insisted on visiting Quail’s Creek. We’d driven by the entrance to Quail’s Creek several times and someone had recommended it to me as a nice, quiet complex. I wouldn’t find drunken undergrads and the price was very reasonable. So we called the rental office and drove up. And into two square miles of vinyl-sided buildings with identical breezeways intersected by rivers of black concrete. With a swimming pool in the middle. As we got out of the car, Marshall said,
“Do you really want to do this?”
“Yeah. I just – Let me look.”
So, after making me fill out a card with my vital information, the guy in the light-blue golf shirt tucked into khaki pants showed us the place. It was small and clean and off-white and smelled the same way every such apartment I’d ever visited had smelled: somewhere between new carpet and plastic and air freshener. The layout was exactly what I’d imagined, too. You go in, there’s the kitchen and on the other side of the counter, you’re in the living room, and the bedroom door is right in front of you. As we walked back to the rental office through the rows and rows of other buildings, I asked Golf-shirt Guy how long Quail’s Creek had been there. He told me it had been built in 2000. The whole thing? All at once? I asked. Yes. And what had been there before? He laughed. “I don’t know. Some pine trees?” While leaving, as I tore my information card, swiped on the way out, into strips, and looked up out the car windows. There, by the entrance, were four or five thin pines. Their tops were higher than the highest apartment roof.

I knew I wasn’t going to live there. I just had to see a one-bedroom apartment that was built intentionally and from the beginning, meant to be there by the builder. I probably also had to see for myself the degree to which I didn’t want to live in such a complex. It was like a palate-cleanser for the next day of searching.

If Day One was the Twilight Zone in a really bad way, Day Two was the exact flip side of that coin. Every single place I looked at was a genuine possibility. It was like a different town with different rules.

By the end, I’d found two places. One’s a cozy, (err, small but really very) cozy apartment on the second floor of a house in the historical district and the other’s a larger place, two streets over. One-hundred dollars difference in the rents. I still haven’t decided which to take and I’m applying to both. We found both by their “For Rent” signs while driving the day before to apartments the realty company was renting. I can see myself in either, and the picture’s really darn nice.

Holy macaroni.
I! Am going! To see Tom Waits at the Tabernacle! Me! Same room! Waaugh!

Eerie: not two weeks after I posted this wish, this man who never tours says he's coming here to my town. I may swoon.

Everything Hurts. Yee-haw!
Hey, folkses. I write to you from the house of Marshall where we are about to prepare a lovely meat-based feast. Last night we had this great conversation with my new (soon to be former) roommate in which she said, quite rightly, re. her vegetarianism, “I mean, I’m not a caveman I'm not running around for my survival. I don’t need to eat bison every day.”

Today Marshall and I ran the Peachtree Roadrace. Today we eat bison.

It was my first time running the thing and I was actually tossing and then turning in la bed last night, worried that I wasn’t amply trained. So I got out of bed at 2:00 and had a swig from someone’s raspberry flavored rum. Which was gross, but made me feel all warm and drowsy again. That feeling was then interrupted by the worry that I would wake up this morning hung-over.

I did have kind of a headache this morning and Marshall wasn’t really wearing good running shoes and I was also somewhat beset by personal lady-woes of the Red Tide variety – but none of this – None of This – kept us from having a surprisingly amazing time running these six-and-some-change miles today along with tens of thousands of our closest friends.

Running the Peachtree Roadrace is Exactly the sort of thing I would never, ever have conceived of doing when I was seventeen. When I was seventeen, I’d walk the Mile Run that we had to do for gym class along with my friends, all of us scoffing at the kids who actually tried - who, you know, ran. Running was for sporty kids. It was really hard. Running hurt.

A few years later I was twenty and in Sevilla, Spain for a semester and had seen and done everything there was to do in Sevilla, Spain. I had two friends from our little student group and we were sick of one another by Month Two. I was lonely and yes, bored. My Senora’s son’s fiancé told me that my tremendous love of crusty bread was making me a little fat. It was right around then that I went to the department store and bought my first pair of running shoes. Those five months I probably both ran and drank more than I ever have since. I ran to the soundtrack of Grosse Point Blank. The first song was “Rudie Can’t Fail” by The Clash. Spaniards would give me funny looks because Spanish people do not run. They are way too fucking cool and too fucking beautiful to run. All of them. The sidewalks in Sevilla are not designed for runners. In parts, they are caving in, and in parts they are upended. There are tree-roots poking up here and there and dog shit just about everywhere. I didn’t care, though. I would run, dodging all these things with my fleet feet just like those tennis-shoe ad people. I would run in the morning sometimes and again in the afternoon. I ran and wrote in my journal and went out at night and drank and danced and drank. Then I got up in the morning, rinsed and repeated. The running probably saved my liver and it cleared my mind. It let me breathe. I still gained weight from all that crusty bread but I came home with a new, uniquely American habit.

I am the dorkish one.
Running is not dignified. At least, I’m not dignified when I run. After fifteen minutes, I am sweating rivers, my face is tomato-red and I’m huffing and puffing. I may feel like that tennis-shoe ad, but I look like a PSA for a heart attack.

I seem to be riding some sort of backlash-it-y wave, though, in recent years, from my high school days of worrying about The Cool. Nowadays I actually gravitate toward the very things I found most undignified as a young gal. If running is undignified, running the Peachtree is extremely so. You like running alone? At dawn or dusk? Just you and the sound of your Chariots of Fire feet chuck-chuck-chucking against the gravel? Take that and add thousands and thousands of other people, in various states of fitness, all hoarded in together on one street. A street lined with giant chain stores and restaurants and office buildings. Along the way, you get sprayed with water. Soon, you find yourself singing along with the John Cougar songs one of the radio stations is blasting at top volume at Mile 2. You befriend the people running alongside you and you grin at all the people who got up at the crack of dawn to wave flags and ring cowbells at you. This is because, instead of feeling like you’re gonna die, which is what you expected, you feel immortal, and it’s these things that are powering you on and making you feel like every cheesy sports metaphor you ever heard about the Eye of the Tiger in the thick of the Zone on a Runner’s High Feeling the Burn is true.

You’ve always hated this shit. Since you figured it out at age fourteen, you’ve taken pride in being nerdy in the coolgirl way: which is well-read and listening to NPR and being a rock-n-roll snob. Now you’re suddenly uncool in a way that can never be made cool: You are finding yourself lured by the jock life. Very lured. You’re talking about future 10-Ks. You’re talking about joining a running club next year when you go back to school. You’re imagining the new ugly running shoes you’ll buy once today is all over. For you, m’dear - m’sweaty, one-hour-twelve-minute 10-K dear - it is all over.

What Garfield's Really All About
When you come right down to it, it's just a sad, sad man who talks to his cat. (You have to scroll down just a bit.)