The Job Search: Day Two
So I broke down and went to this beach restaurant where my friend at school tends bar, to see about getting a hostessing job. Hostessing. This seems more benign than waitressing. You smile wide at people. You greet them. You walk them to their seat and keep track of where you’ve seated them.

No remembering that this guy needs more mustard, while this lady’s returning her ice water because she wanted no ice and moreover, no balancing multiple hot dishes of piping-hot food on your arm.
Okay; let’s just admit right now that I have a phobia about that. The dish-balancing thing. That it terrifies me.

So, also true; hostessing also seems like you make less money. Because you do. But it beats the six dollars an hour I’d make doing just about anything else in town.
(And oh, my god; I’m almost thirty. I’m almost thirty and I’ve been a professional and my work’s been respected and even like, vaunted, but now I’m looking at service fricking jobs again deep breaths phew god okay.)

So this was what I was thinking as I walked up to the restaurant, retail resume in hand. I filled out the application and a waitress went and got the manager, who flew out of the kitchen and grabbed my hand and shook it hard and I smiled big, big, big. She was the picture of harried and said, with the voice of someone used to breathing more smoke than regular air,
“Good to meetchyou. Let’s look at that application.” She sat down. I sat across from her. “Uh-kay. Uh-kay. When could you start? Immediately? Uh-kay. We need someone for next week. Oh, hosting? Good. Very good. So you’re good with people-”
“I’m very good with people.”
“Good.” And she pulled out a paper napkin. “Tell me your availability.”
“Like, for now?”
“Yes. This month. When?”
I told her the days I could work, she nodded approvingly as she wrote, then stood and shook my hand again and smiled and said she was glad my friend had recommended me and that it looked very, very good; they’d call me sometime this week.

I went back outside, dazed by the move from icy air conditioning to midday heat. Also: Good with people? Oh. And realized she’d read my application so fast, she’d misunderstood “host” to mean “host at restaurant,” when what it really signifies is “radio host,” which is quite a different beast which requires an entirely separate set of skills. Most radio hosts are, in fact terrible with people, if you want to know. If there is an opposite job in the world from restaurant host, that’d be it.
But she still may call. And I will say Yes.

Too poor, too poor, just a little too poor.
This afternoon running a few errands on my way to campus, I found myself getting uncomfortably warm in my un-air-conditioned little car for the first time this year. I wiped my forehead, glanced in the rearview mirror and found I’d achieved that sought-after “sweaty bangs sticking to face in weird chunks” look. The look of the summertime, which I realized, is almost upon us.

I’m a little nervous about spending the impending school-free season here in Beachtown. My err, social life, has taken a weird turn and I spend most of my time alone, now. I look forward to those classes of mine with a voracity young Laura Ingles Wilder would admire.

Also, I have to find a job. I’ve got some freelance writing things here and there, but that doesn’t provide enough cash to, say, eat every day. So today I started scoping out my prospects in earnest. There’s waitressing-a-plenty at the thirty-thousand beachy restaurants around here. I’ve never waitressed. It’s the final frontier of service jobs for me. What makes me most nervous is that in order to get one of these jobs, I’d have to lie and say I’ve done it before, and I imagine getting hired and it being assumed I possess this whole bevy of skills that are completely foreign to me. That balancing-dishes-on-your-arm thing. That Social Code Among Waitresses and Busboys and Kitchen Staff thing. No clue.

I dunno. Call me cowardly, but so far, I’ve applied at a coffee shop, which is something I have ample, ample experience in, and a wine shop (My father’s a wine geek and I learned to use a corkscrew before I learned to drive. Before I learned algebra, even.) Neither pays very well and I’m not even sure either is hiring.
I kind of want a fish out of water job, to tell you the truth, Mr. H. Something totally new and unfamiliar. To assist on a fishing boat or I don’t know, a pirate ship. It’s the beach, after all.
Anyhoo, I’ll keep you updated.

Milk outcher nose
This week, my favorite radio show, This American Life, makes the move to television. Which makes my snotty little public-radio-adorin' heart sad, because:

1. The great thing about TAL is that it is radio. That whole romantic pictures-in-your-mind thing.
2. of the implication, here, that the visual media are always a natural step up from radio, which before now, TAL has always stood out as a beacon against.
3. my little snobby cool kids' club is hitting the mainstream and will no longer be my snobby little cool kids' club.

Ah, well. A lot of people have been telling me it looks really good and I believe 'em.

But no matter how you feel, to mark this historic event, I implore you, if you are a fan of or even an occasional listener, accidental-or-on-purpose, to the show, to listen to this. This online comedy troupe, Kasper Hauser, has made a spot-on, hysterical parody of the show that's only about three minutes long. Oh, and there's also another short bit of TAL host, Ira Glass, telling a guy from the troupe how to effect the This American Life-announcer sound.
Funny, funny, funny.

Service and Repair, Part I
Today, I hung out with my landlady’s main man, Awkward Maintenance Man, whom I’ve told ya’ll about before.

He came in to try to fix my electricity, only half of which has been working since I came back from Spring Break last week (not including the bathroom lights and fan. In the interim last week, he loaned me a gigantic, canary yellow metal construction spotlight-lamp, which made peeing and showers feel something like interrogation. Which was fun.)

[Also, this: I had an old, dear friend in Chapel Hill, NC who used to collect stories of awkwardness like little Pac Man cherries, and my exchange with AMM immediately called him to mind—so if you’re reading, m’dear, consider this for you.]

Okay, so it was *obvious* that I was doing schoolwork at my little kitchen table. But AMM kept making random stabs at conversation anyway. These stabs petered out, politely, on my end, but still he kept on. At one point, the pseudo-conversation took this turn:

AMM: So. You still have that boyfriend?
[Note: *You* are a fifty-something graying maintenance fellow alone with your tenant, who is a young, single woman, in her apartment. Alone. You two are very much alone and the doors are all shut.]
Alice: Nope. Actually, that ended. Um, this fall.
AMM: Oh-!
[Moment of silence.]
AMM: Well, he certainly seemed like a nice guy.
Alice: Oh yeah, he was.
AMM: Well, those long-distance things-
Alice: Yeah. Just not a good idea.
AMM: -sometimes, for the best.

Oh, AMM, you make my awkward world go ‘round!


Repairs II
Well, so I got my electricity back, mostly. Now I’m not supposed to use my ceiling fan, though, because it’ll kill it all again, so I have a lovely new piece of duct tape over that switch.

So I was talking with a friend once about apartment life, though, how it brings with it some natural sense of accommodation. Like so: You don’t start dancing to the soundtrack of Trainspotting with your pit bull and five of your closest friends at 3:30 in the morning (based on a true story), and I won’t peer into your kitchen window at you as you make lunch.

Which is now, also, a true story. Yesterday I got back from my grandma’s and when I stepped into my apartment, Dangercat was yelling at me, but I couldn’t hear him. I stepped around the giant construction lamp in my entryway and turned on a cd of audiodocumentary, but even at top-volume, I couldn’t hear that either. All I could hear was the scream of the electric equipment belonging to three workmen who were sanding paint off of the (surprisingly thin) wall that separates the inside of my tiny apartment from my secret balcony and the entire wide world beyond. I went to make a salad and right outside my window with the broken blind that won’t shut, there were the workmen, who waved to me, one by one. I waved back. Then I went and sat with my ear to my boombox to listen to the documentary, but realized that I’d really just have to leave to house to do much of anything.

They were back this morning at 7:00, but I was already awake. I was at the window again, washing a pan I’d just cooked an egg in, when the first one showed up. We waved.

I’d gotten up early to get things done. This was more out of the vague sense of nameless urgency that’s been stalking me lately than the possession of an actual, concrete to-do list.

However, the facts hit me pretty quickly once I was up. To be clearer, I stubbed my toe on one of two suitcases that were holding court in my apartment. They were both still full of clothes and sundry toiletries from the two recent stints out of town, and they shared the space with the full laundry bag, which I’d spent the last week moving back and forth, from the bedroom to the other room, depending on which room I’m in. Then there were the copies of classmates’ stories I need to critique for classes and multiple stories of mine that've been critiqued by classmates, still unread. The photocopied ideas for exercises for my students. The mail pile. The tower of library books. The tower of lit journals from the writing conference in Atlanta. The tower of books that don’t fit on my overburdened shelves.

I’ve spent recent days navigating around all this in a matter that’s either fairly impressive or disturbing, considering the bonny wee scale (again, I insist to you) of my apartment. But this morning, I woke up and could no longer stand it. The fact is, I’ve been totally immersed in this one particular writing project lately whenever I’m not all immersified in this thing that I’ve started referring to in my mind as My Very Own Personal Drama!(TM). Or, more to the point: to avoid thinking about the latter, I delve into the former. And the result is a physical mess.

No mas! though. Today I did laundry. Today I tidied up. And tomorrow? Why, tomorrow, I shall make into soup, the vegetables and beef that are waiting patiently in my fridge still housed in their plastic grocery bags. Soup from my grandma’s recipe, only not quite as good because it just will never be. Which is totally okay.

This Brand of Innocuous
In Beachtown’s coffeeshops, grocery stores, radio stations and bars, there is just no escape from:

1. Blues Traveler
2. Counting Crows
3. Hootie
Oh, wait. And that “I always have to steal my kisses from you” person. Who is that?
Oh. Make that-

4. Ben Harper

It’s just that kind of town.

The friendliest of skies.

I wrote this in one of two airports in Chicago a couple days ago; still not sure which one. Then I tried to open up el internet and found that you had to pay for it. So here it is now, m'dears.


This is my first time using my laptop from an airport. Chicago. Visiting a friend over this customary weeklong respite from formal academia that I understand the kids call Spring Break.

In the row behind me on the three-hour plane from Atlanta, was this Young Business Dude with a really loud voice hitting on a young British businesswoman. He enthused over bars in Atlanta's Buckhead neighborhood and over Jennifer Love Hewitt (“Hey, I'm just saying I wouldn’t say no.”) He punctuated many of his sentences with “Sweet!” I thought about tallying up the number of instances he said it, but then decided I’d prefer to try to shut it out altogether. But then that turned out to be impossible, too.
So I—and the poor man and woman sitting to my right—got to sit through several hours that began like so:

He: “So, you’re English, huh? I’ve always wanted to visit England. What’s the best part?”
She: “Really depends on what you like. Err, what do you enjoy?”
He: “Oh, beer—pubs! Castles, I guess. And I’d like to jaunt up to Scotland, too. You know: Wear a kilt, play some bagpipes, the whole deal!”

So I waited for the put-down. But instead, she started flirting back. I’m trying to think of how to frame this for you, Henshaw, in a vein of pure humor, one not colored by my cramped up legs after multiple hours in the air and one on the ground (We were delayed before take-off by everyone’s surplus carry-on luggage, and after landing by another plane that was having technical difficulties pulling away from the gate.) These things, they make a difference.

One thing.
When all of us were just getting seated, my seatmates and I exchanged a few friendly words. But as the trip progressed, the three of us grew increasingly reserved with one another, even growing to avoid eye contact. This, however, was a silence of camaraderie: We were attempting to make room for one another, to replace for one another some of the space the loud people behind us had thoughtlessly pilfered.

The Fairest Books of All
Well, I’m back in Atalanta for a few days, and el great big writing conference is over.
Best part was wandering around meeting folks at what they called the “book fair:” tables and tables (something like 250—Crackergal, lemme know if I’m way off) where folks from literary journals and small presses sat.

I scored a number of really cool free or cheap literary journals. Beautiful writing, beautiful design. Also a book of matches from some lit mag in New York.
(Had this interaction with guy at that table or another:
Alice: So, where are you published?
Guy: Brooklyn.
Alice: Oh, New York. Cool.
Guy: Well, Brooklyn, actually. There’s a difference.

If I’d gone around in opposite order, I could’ve smacked him with the flyswatter I got from Crazyhorse, but I didn’t have it yet.
(When the nice gal at that table handed it to me, the woman the next table over immediately began making bondage jokes in a loud, “Hah, hah. I am so very naughty,” voice. Hm. Maybe I wouldn’t have swatted Mr. Brooklyn, after all.)

So exciting. There was this giddiness in the air at getting to say hello, hello, hello to everyone. Really, lots of nice people. (None of them attractive menfolk, Henshaw. Geez. What do you take me for? I’ve told you; we’re all pale, homely, garret-y, scholarly sorts. [Ahem.])

Anyway.

So there was the book fair—which, by the way, did your elementary school ever have those? That’s all I could think about whenever anyone mentioned it. Like, in 4th grade? Where you’d get a glossy folded thing advertising Garfield books and Mad Libs and Bunnicula and all those pre-teen books that were popular when I was ten about girls diagnosed with terminal illnesses? I swear there was one called I Want to Live, and another called Six Months to Live. Girls would pass them around like Playboys in homeroom. That’s what I think of when I think, “book fair.”

(I just did an internet search and apparently the Dying Girl books were written by this woman named Lurlene McDaniel. Her webcopy says, “Everyone loves a good cry, and no one delivers heartwrenching stories better than Lurlene McDaniel.”
Though it says she also does lots of psychological research for each book and her site also has volunteer organizations for kids wanting to make a difference. Well.)
Still.
This was a step up from that.


Found in Atlanta
One journal at the writers’ convention was having a contest whose deadline was sometime this week. The topic was “Found,” and we were to frame it around our experience here in Atlanta.

What have I found. Well.
I’ve found that this town, which I spent so many years hating with such venom, always half-plotting escape, now feels more like home than any other place.
Mostly, it’s rather unlovely here. Still, it’s such comfort. I drive the streets without thinking. The sidewalks feel like some private part of a house that belongs to me. I check the skyline at night for my favorite building—the Bank of America tower—and I can exhale. That belongs to me, too.

Mostly what I see behind my eyelids when someone mentions “Atlanta,” is a map of the city’s layout of freeways: 75/85 slithering through the center, like some two-headed, two-tailed serpent. Like some version of a river in a city that’s pretty much riverless (unlike the one I grew up in.) (No. Not counting the Chattahoochee.) 400 poking its head up there, too. I-20 belting the center and 285 circling it all. It looks like some primitive child’s drawing of a present.

It’s what my older sister first drew for me on the back of a Creative Loafing, the second or third day after I’d moved here.
“This. Is…Atlanta,” she said, scrawling it out and labeling each road, scrawling and then scratching out and re-drawing 400 to get it right. I was looking for an apartment. I was intimidated beyond belief.

In the time since then, that drawing has become my one blueprint for life in the past six years or so. The layout on top of which I superimpose nearly every change that’s taken place in my 20s. That one, I think, recalling. And then, again. Addresses lived at, worked at, roles played:

Cheery nonprofit worker fresh from college, dead-broke backpacker, blissed-out girlfriend, disgruntled punkrock coffeeshop chick biking down Moreland Avenue, PR writer for hire, shop clerk, younger sister, roommate, pained girlfriend, freelancer, reporter, aunt, award-winner, “area personality,” depressed girl at 2:00 a.m. grocery store visit, dog-owner, single girl dancing wildly at Lenny’s with friends, singer in short-lived rock band, new neighbor, old neighbor, ex-girlfriend, then ex-girlfriend again and then, gone.

And every cheap, delicious restaurant. And every closed rock-and-roll venue (Echolounge, RIP). And every friend. I drive down rusted out Dekalb. The Krog Street tunnel. I see us all like shadows. Only vivid.