TWENTY TWENTY HINDSIGHT

I’ve been in New York for a week, and with the exception of a few forays outside the hotel to eat, get lost, and then call anyone I know who might have access to Google Maps, I’ve spent most of my time waiting for the elevator at the Marriott Marquis in Times Square. There are a dozen glass elevators in the center of the building and during hotel rush hour—which is all the time—I might wait 15 minutes to get back to my room, a room that lacks all the amenities of a Comfort Inn and yet costs $400 a night. I’m here because the owner of the publishing house where I freelance needed someone to work a convention at the hotel and I’m the only employee old enough to rent a car. I spend all day at a booth in the convention hall and spend evenings eating spanakopita and drinking hotel wine with authors and academics in receptions hosted by richer companies than mine. The authors and academics are impressed with my knowledge of contemporary literature and my willingness to argue with them. I don’t mention that my opinions are derived from a quick perusal of a New York Review of Books someone left in the hotel lobby and that I’m arguing mostly because they like it and I’m in sales. By the end of the night, they’re all hitting on me, and I say I’m going to use the bathroom before ducking into the elevator for the long ride up. The next day, they stop by the booth for small talk and no one mentions that I never came back.

New York is a place I came to fairly often as a kid. My dad’s parents lived 200 miles north of the city in Homer, a town named after an epic poet that didn’t have a bookstore or even a newspaper, and we’d stop in the city for a little sightseeing on the way to Grandma and Grandpa’s house every summer. Usually our parents would drop us off with the grandparents and drive straight back to the city for a week while my siblings and I slept behind the house in an ancient RV without power or a working toilet and helped Grandpa hunt the beavers that were turning his land to swamp. I preferred upstate to the city, which always struck me as inconvenient and rather filthy. I didn’t want to go to Statue of Liberty or Rockefeller Center or Central Park, all of which were likely harboring virulent species of flesh-eating pigeons or, at the very least, pickpockets. On one of our trips to the city, we were on the observation deck of the Empire State Building when it caught fire. My mom dragged me down 86 flights of stairs, and I went home with a sprained ankle and a story that I felt gave me the impression of being adventurous, although I would have preferred the trailer in Homer, watching Grandpa hunt beavers and reading chapter books about scrappy orphans who lived in boxcars, to any sort of adventure.

The fire in the Empire State Building and New York in general didn’t compare to the vacation we took in Atlanta one summer, when we somehow convinced our parents to take us to the World of Coca-Cola, a museum enticing to all kids, but especially those like us, the children of hippies, who were raised to think that Sprite was seltzer with a slice of lemon. When we asked to go to Disney World, our mom told us that we were not Disney people and gave us seconds of plain yogurt–which we thought was ice cream–and yet, they took us to a museum celebrating capitalism and high fructose syrup. The tour started with the origins of Coca-Cola, which was invented by an Atlanta pharmacist in 1886, and went through all the big moments in the brand’s history, from the first bottles and cans through the disastrous recipe change of 1985. The museum made Coke seem like a benevolent force spreading joy and bubbles across 200 countries, even ones in Africa where kids didn’t wear shoes but looked mighty happy holding bottles of Coke in high-resolution photographs blown up on the wall. Coca-Cola, it seemed, had a reach like the hand of God, and at the end of the tour, when we came to a room of fountains spewing every kind of soda imaginable, where you pushed a button and Coke or Sprite or Orange Crush would come streaming into your cup without having to beg your parents for two quarters for the vending machine, it really felt like heaven.

In Atlanta, we stayed at the Marriott Marquis downtown, a hotel much like this one in Times Square. This was also out of character for my family. Most of our vacations took place on a tiny island in the lowcountry of South Carolina, where the locals spoke Gullah and Martin Luther King, Jr., Andrew Young, and other civil right leaders had vacationed in the ‘60s. None of the houses had air conditioning and our primary source of entertainment was listening to the neighbors gossip on the party line and catching small green lizards that we’d flip on their backs and watch play dead while our dad told us about defense mechanisms. My bedroom at the beach house was always dirty, with dark paneled walls and a blood-red bunk bed. Its only source of light was a fluorescent lamp advertising Schlitz that belonged over a bar, and I wanted one for my room back home. The Marriott Marquis in Atlanta was different. That hotel also had glass elevators, and they scared the hell out of me. While my brother and sister would press their noses to the glass to get the best view of the lobby speeding away at three floors per second, I would cower in the corner for the ride 30 or 40 floors up. This was typical: fireworks, thunder, unleashed dogs—each sent me running for my dad, arms raised, begging him to pick me up. When I got too big to be held, I would wrap my arms around his legs and hide my face from whatever terrifying thing was out there, a defense mechanism better than playing dead.

Last night, feeling like I should experience New York outside of the Marriott Marquis for at least an hour or two, I decided to meet a friend at a bar on the roof of a La Quinta Inn in Koreatown. I Googled the directions and the asked the concierge to look them over for me and stopped a cop on horseback on the way there just to make sure, but I was still disoriented when I got to Koreatown and went into the wrong building. There was no elevator, so I started walking up the stairs to the roof, past a restaurant full of people speaking languages I didn’t understand. On the second floor there was a karaoke bar and on the third floor there was another restaurant with no white people in it and on the fourth floor there was a no trespassing sign. I was starting to sweat and it wasn’t because of the walk up. I should have stayed at the Marriott Marquis, I thought, a glass and gold hotel full of tourists with money, a place where the most terrifying thing is the line for the elevator and you always know just where you are. I turned around and went downstairs to ask directions. I got lucky: the La Quinta Inn was the next door over, and the elevator was working, and there my friend was, casually drinking beer in the shadow of the Empire State Building as though it’s perfectly normal to live in a city with 8.2 million people, a city with strangers and glass elevators and buildings that could catch fire at any moment. And for my friend, this is perfectly normal. Navigating to a bar on the roof of the La Quinta Inn in Koreatown is just a Thursday night for her, nothing to sweat about. Other things she’s done that I haven’t: live in Alaska, travel to Iceland and get married.

Soon, it was time to make my way back to the hotel. I had written down precise directions on how to get to the La Quinta Inn but no directions back. How hard could it be? I’d just go left where I went right before. But it was hard, and I was quickly lost. I wandered down blocks empty but for street cleaning crews that seemed to be following me, trusting my inner sense of direction, which is always wrong, before calling my sister in Colorado and trying not to cry. I’m lost, I said. Can you help me find my way? With Google’s help, she did, and I got back to the hotel and took the elevator to my room, which doesn’t even have a coffee maker or a mini-fridge, but at least I’m not lost among 8.2 million people anymore. And I won’t be again: the conference ends tomorrow, so I’ll hand out the last of my business cards, pack up the rental car and point it towards home, a place between the World of Coca-Cola and the Empire State Building, where there’s no hand of God, but there’s no fire either.

I’m not one prone to great passions. Rather, I try to live like Switzerland: neutral, isolationist, leggy. Like workaholics whose doctors tell them to slow down, to chill out, to reduce their blood pressure or risk heart disease and stroke, indifference is an attitude I’ve had to cultivate. I’m naturally more anxious than indifferent, but a concerted effort toward neutrality gives me a rather Zen attitude about life. At least, that’s how I look at it. Friends, family, and girlfriends have argued that I’m not Zen, I’m just too damn lazy to care about anything, but I consider my basic desire to stay out of it a personal strength.

I began my path toward neutrality at seven, a nervous age in which I often had panic attacks because one of my bike tires was white and one was black and spent most nights sleeping at the foot of my parents’ bed like a golden retriever. One day after school, I mentioned to my mother that is was a shame we lost the War. What war, she asked. This was in the midst of the first Gulf War and for weeks she had been listening to war correspondents on NPR while looking outside at the ubiquitous yellow ribbons tied around our neighbors’ trees–ribbons indicating a son or a cousin or a father in Kuwait. The War of Northern Aggression, I replied. Duh. My mom quickly explained that it was actually called the Civil War and we didn’t lose anything–our ancestors were still bootlegging potato liquor in Dublin until the 20th century. Thus began my introduction to slavery, which was not an aspect of the Civil War my second grade teacher emphasized. This wasn’t surprising–the mascot of my elementary school was a Confederate general with the same facial hair and politics as Robert E. Lee–and so my mom decided to take over my history education. After that evening’s lesson on the slave trade through Reconstruction and the civil rights movement (with a brief detour for suffrage and bra burning), my mom warned me about the dangers of looking at the world as North versus South, him versus her, us versus them. Nationalism, sectionalism, religion, ideology, alliances based on nothing more than the shape of your nose or your favorite sports team: this is why wars happen, she told me, pointing to yellow ribbon tied around a tree in the next door neighbor’s yard. We should try to be more like Switzerland, she said: secular, progressive, and not out to steal anyone else’s damn resources. I took her advice, and that’s how I’ve been for most of my life; like Switzerland, as calm and even-keeled as a Walt Disney in a cryogenic chamber. Currently, however, I live in a part of the world marked by a great and unavoidable passion that sparks waves of love and hate all around me. The cause is basketball.

Two years ago, I moved to Durham, North Carolina, a city of a quarter million people, 15 percent of whom (including me) live under the poverty line. Durham used to be known for tobacco and then it was known civil rights and now it’s known for food trucks and lesbians. Durham is home to Duke University, where the endowment is 5.8 billion dollars and the cost for one student to attend for one year is 56 thousand dollars, 23 thousand dollars more than the median income for those of us who live here year round. For this privilege, Duke pays no taxes. For the most part, life as a Durham resident has little to do with the university; this is even true when you live, as I do, in Walltown, an adjacent neighborhood that the University kept at bay by building a wall around itself. There isn’t a moat separating the two, but the lines are clearly demarcated. Yes, Duke students clog the aisles at the grocery store and throw their keg cups in the street, but Durham is not a college town. Duke, it seems, prefers it this way, ensconced within monied walls of academia. Summers in Durham, when all the students have gone back to Connecticut–those are best.

Part of my hatred for Duke is situational: before I moved to Durham, I lived eight miles down 15-501, in Carrboro, North Carolina, a town of 20 thousand people, 19 percent of whom live under the poverty line. Carrboro is literally across the tracks from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and while the two towns are culturally different–Carrboro passed a resolution opposing the PATRIOT Act, Chapel Hill made national news when police brandishing assault rifles stormed a vacant building taken over by protesters last fall–both townships have a common love for UNC basketball. When I first moved to Carrboro, this surprised me. My friends there were as politically radical as my friends elsewhere, and since when do radicals care about sports? How could these people who play in rock bands and make art and grow weed care about anything as inconsequential as basketball? It seemed so anti-intellectual, so non-thinking, so barbarian. My own alma mater, a liberal arts school most well-known for its high ratio of banjo players and white Rastas, may have had a basketball team, but who knows? The student body was too busy tripping on mushrooms in the botanical gardens to care about sports, although I do seem to remember a vibrant ultimate Frisbee scene.

I refused to care about basketball when I first moved to Carrboro. Sports, which exist solely to create winners and losers, are antithetical to my default neutrality. But UNC basketball is so universally loved there that it inspires passion even in those whose only nod to athleticism is hula-hooping on the co-op lawn. I tried to stay neutral, but the central winter pastime in Carrboro is watching basketball with your pals at the local bar, and so, in the midst of my first winter there, in the midst of insisting on my indifference, I found myself watching ESPN, working on my bracket, and really, really hating UNC’s biggest rival: Duke. As a friend–a woman who plays in bands, never wanted to be a cheerleader, and often says that Carrboro is where basketball and punk rock meet–predicted would happen, I became one of us. In March 2009, the year the Heels won the National Championship, I ran across the tracks to Chapel Hill with 30,000 other fans–30,000 other barbarians–to celebrate our victory.

But more than I love UNC, I hate Duke. All of my well-cultivated neutrality flies out the window when I think of Duke University. I can engage in conversation with people across the political spectrum and still maintain my equilibrium, but Duke, I cannot stand. I hate Duke students, I hate Duke fans, and, mostly, I hate Mike Krzyzewski, or as he is known to both fans and foes alike because his name is too damn hard to pronounce, Coach K. Coach K is the perfect foil. Nothing about him is neutral. His vocal support of religion and the military, along with his income, makes him the embodiment of all that I think is wrong with the world. My feelings for him are universal, as I found when researching Duke basketball for this article. This is illustrated by the following screenshot:

Coach K is the devil. Coach K is a rat. Coach K is a cheater. And, most offensive (to gay people), Coach K is gay. Let us contrast this to Roy Williams, beloved coach of the Tar Heels, a man with the sweet face of a plot hound who bought romance novels from the bookstore where I worked during the terrible season of 2010, when his team had the record of a third rate liberal arts school. Even then, Roy was friendly. He came in after depressing practices and embarrassing games, but still posed for pictures and signed autographs and graciously agreed things were not going well. That March, when the UNC men’s basketball team was as vibrant as a banana slug and Duke won the National Championship, I discovered the corollary to success. Every game that Carolina lost, every game that Duke won, found half my friends sobbing into their beers and the other half taking a Valium and going to bed early. And this, I realized, is why I am Switzerland: the disappointment isn’t worth the joy. My days as a fan were over, but my hatred of Duke only escalated when I moved the eight miles to Durham. For me, it’s not about basketball. It’s about privilege. I hate Duke because Coach K is worth millions and my neighbor lost her house; because Duke doesn’t pay taxes and Durham has no jobs; because this place for the rich is so close to the home I struggle to afford; because it’s right there, beyond the wall, a dark blue reminder that I’ll never be neutral. Maybe that’s what my mom wanted me to take from our afternoon history lessons: there’s a time to be Swiss and there’s a time to put on your school colors and scream.

Recently, a friend who was organizing a benefit party for Protect NC Families, an organization working to defeat North Carolina’s anti-gay Amendment One, called me. She said that she wanted to have a tipping booth at the party and asked if I would be willing to man it. Sure, I said. I wasn’t quite sure what a tipping booth was, but I pictured myself carrying around a gold jar full of cash donations. I was later informed that my hearing is awful and what I actually agreed to do was a kissing booth, not a tipping booth. This took more thought. Was I willing to risk mouth herpes for a good cause? Not really. And besides, what kind of people pay to kiss someone on Saturday night at a bar? Drunk people, and I’m almost 30. I’ve kissed enough drunk people. We decided instead to do a compliment and advice-dispensing booth, which would be more helpful and less contagious. My friend Camille joined me in the booth, which was partitioned off with a red velvet drape so it looked like we were telling fortunes or reading Tarot cards, and we made over $100 in tips, which put the total over $4000, all of it going to Protect NC Families.

In the midst of dispensing compliments and advice (What a beautiful neckline: you should always wear v-necks; it doesn’t matter if his girlfriend sucks: don’t make out with him until he dumps her; you found your dream job but it means a pay cut: get food stamps.), a queer woman entered the booth with a concern: a representative from Protect NC Families had just spoken and he didn’t mention gay people at all. Instead, he talked about how Amendment One would affect all unmarried couples. And this is true. Amendment One would, according to the ACLU, “take away the ability of committed couples to take care of one another when making medical, financial, and other important life decisions.” All unmarried couples, gay and straight alike, could potentially lose the right to adopt their partner’s kid, make end-of-life decisions, etc. It’s awful. But the woman who approached us was pissed because that’s all they talked about–how this is going to affect families–not the fact that this issue only exists because of homophobia.

Lots of organizations are using this tactic. ACLU mailers don’t show gay couples: they show pictures of heterosexual couples with babies and without wedding rings. A friend of mine is making promotional films for another national organization working to defeat the amendment, and after he interviewed a lesbian couple who has been together for 50 years, his boss told him to edit out all references to their sexuality. This is politics and I get it. These groups are appealing to the middle, to the people who might not advocate for gays but don’t want to see the rights of unmarried straight people curtailed. But it feels like our concerns are being neglected, and unnecessarily so. The people who are going to vote against this amendment are our allies. They would still be here, drinking and dancing and paying for compliments even if this amendment solely disenfranchised the gays.

The congressmen who introduced this bill and the people who vote for it may think that you, your mate, and your bastard child are going to spend eternity in Hell with the homosexuals and the Jews, but you are not the real target of their hatred or their legislation. I speak for all gays when I say that we sincerely appreciate the thought, work, and money that so many people have put into this, but the ACLU, Protect NC Families, and the other organizations fighting against this amendment need to acknowledge those of us who do not have the option to marry if the bigots on the right and in the government win. Straight people may be affected by this, but they will be able to work around it if they must. It’s not about you. It’s about us, and it’s time to start listening. That’s my advice. Tip jar to your right.

I haven’t been writing lately and there are reasons for this–the most significant being that writing is a pain in the ass. There are things I dislike more than writing–for instance, public laundromats and the self-flushing toilets that Whole Foods just installed like it’s an interstate rest stop–but writing is there with them on the list of my least favorite activities. And yet, even though I’d happily go months writing nothing longer than a grocery list, when I have to turn to the person beside me in yoga class and introduce myself, I always say that I’m a writer. I do this because I think it makes me sound like I have a rich inner life, when all I really have is a lot of TV to watch and some unfinished essays waiting for someone else to pick them up. The most literary thing about me these days is that I’m poor.

Some people say they must write; they feel incomplete without it. I hate those people. To me, writing is like walking very slowly on a treadmill. After a thousand steps, you smell bad, you’re tired, and you’re right where you started; as soon as you finish one sentence, you have to start the next. Even my motivation for writing is problematic: I do it for the attention. Everything I write beyond to-do lists and my own signature is meant for an audience of some sort. The one time I felt truly excited about writing was in graduate school. I was a terrible student–I never purchased any textbooks and I didn’t attend my own final presentation in one class–but every lecture that I went to was uninterrupted time to write. As long as I looked up every once in a while so my teachers thought I was listening, I could get 2000 words down in a single class. But now that graduate school is over and I spend all day working on other peoples’ terrible manuscripts, the last thing I want to do when I get home is pick up my own. So I watch TV instead.

These months of silence, however, have not been entirely without creative expression of a kind. Earlier this year, I started a Tumblr called Babes of NPR. The concept is simple: a picture of an NPR personality with a caption about who they are and how good they look. Example: Doualy Xaykaothao: Hard to spell, easy to look at. Coming up with captions is far easier than attending group therapy for recovering meth addicts in order to write a story that four people read including my sister, and only then because I told her she was in it. Even better than giving me an excuse not to write (I would finish that story about sleepwalking topless into my neighbor’s house but I have captions to do.), Babes of NPR has had a brief flirtation with Internet success. Granted, the amount of attention BONPR has received is small in the context of the Internet, where a Japanese cat named Maru has 100 million followers and is on the Emperor’s Christmas list, but it’s has gotten attention from exactly the audience I want: the babes of NPR themselves.

I launched the site in the beginning of February–and by “launched,” I posted a picture of Ari Shapiro with the caption: White House Correspondent/gay/Jewish/North Dakotan/babe, and then flooded Facebook with the news that I had just done something clever. It took more than a single picture of Mr. Shapiro (who is legitimately hot, not just public radio hot), but after a few more posts and Facebook blasts, NPR employees–the very people I was inviting the Internet to objectify–started noticing. A week in, I left my desk for a few minutes after my boss’s dog ate a box of frozen chicken nuggets and farted us all out of the office, and came back to an inbox full of emails. Hundreds of them. It turned out that a producer at Fresh Air had tweeted about BONPR, and all of a sudden my audience went from the few people I badgered into looking at to actual strangers, who, I hoped, would tell their friends, who would tell their friends, who would tell their friends. I saw my inbox and shouted that I was going viral, which both confused the hell out of my co-workers and turned out not be true.

My expectations from that very first spike in hits were huge, and continued to rise. I was interviewed by websites and newspapers, strangers found me on Facebook, and I got tons of submissions. It was exciting. When I got notifications that Audie Cornish, Peter Sagal, Ari Shapiro, or Mo Rocca mentioned BONPR on Twitter, I sent them to my parents. After Scott Simon re-tweeted me to 1.2 million people, Finally, I thought, I’m doing something my mom can tell her friends about. I started to get visions of turning BONPR into something culturally important. I would make a Babes of NPR calendar and donate the proceeds to public radio; no, a coffee table book! A heavy, expensive coffee table book with blurbs by Ira Glass and Alec Baldwin on the cover. Maybe after the coffee table book comes out I’d be on Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! Or, better yet, Fresh Air, discussing what it’s like to be Internet famous with Terry Gross. I stared planning the forward to the coffee table book: about how, thanks to my parents’ politics and their radio, I was a baby of NPR; about how this book was my way of giving back to public radio, my way of thanking the people whose voices are, literally, more familiar than my own.

But beyond a few special moments–getting a shout-out from Peter Sagal on Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me!, reading a write-up in the New York Observer (“Oddly funny, moderately creepy”), hearing Ira Glass’s reaction (“Oh, this is just sad. Oh, look at this. Holy fuck.”), and receiving a t-shirt in the mail from NPR headquarters–nothing much has happened. This is the nature of the Internet: something is big for five minutes and then Snooky gets pregnant and we move on. My expectations rose too quickly, nothing really happened, and so my enthusiasm has dimmed. With each new follower, with each new submission, with each notification that someone I listen to on the radio knows about my blog, I’ve became a little less excited. When Fiona Ritchie, whose accent my sister imitated for an entire summer when we were nine, started following me on Twitter, I didn’t even bother to tell my parents. After six weeks, 111 posts, 2439 Tumblr followers, 276 tweets, a Facebook page, and some BONPR tote bags I drew in Microsoft Paint, I’m not just not famous, I’m losing momentum. Enough people have submitted names that I no longer have to scour the NPR.org for babes, but it’s hard to think of new ways to call people attractive. It just feels like work now. Like writing.

At this point, I have no indication that Babes of NPR is ever going to be more than a website that a few people look at when they’re supposed to be making PowerPoints or reviewing manuscripts, but here’s the thing about the Internet–the potential for success may be small, but it is real. We saw this with Stuff White People Like and Shit My Dad Says and every momentary cultural phenomenon that started out online. It’s hard to let go of the hope that even if I’ll never be Maru, maybe with a few more followers, a few more captions, a few more tweets from Scott Simon or Peter Sagal, that coffee table book will need a forward after all. And that is writing I look forward to.

Kony 2012 is a film created by Invisible Children Inc. The film’s purpose is to promote the charity’s ‘Stop Kony’ movement to make Ugandan war criminal Joseph Kony internationally known in order to successfully arrest him in 2012. As of 8 March 2012, the film had over 8.2 million views on Vimeo and over 15.9 million views on YouTube. A number of celebrities have endorsed the campaign, including Rihanna, Taylor Swift, Christina Milian, Nicky Minaj, and Kim Kardashian. As part of the campaign, supporters will put up posters promoting Kony 2012 in their hometowns. Invisible Children has distributed hundreds of thousands of posters in an attempt to gain wider recognition on the issue. They have also issued action kits that include campaign buttons, posters, bracelets, and stickers to help spread awareness. (From Wikipedia)

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1.) This guy is too attractive. He’s probably a moron.
2.) Is that a fake British accent?
3.) He’s going to give his kid nightmares.
4.) No, seriously. He just showed his kid a picture of the Boogeyman.
5.) There sure a lot of white people in this movie about Africa.
6.) Shit. He’s right. If a single blond baby in America were taken from his parents’ arms and forced to shoot them, there wouldn’t just be Amber Alerts on every interstate, it would be fictionalized in an episode of SVU.
7.) How have I never heard of any of this before? I listen to NPR, damnit.
8.) Am I crying? It must be PMS.
9.) Those look like campaign posters. People are going to write in “Kony” in November.
10.) Definitely crying.
11.) Holy shit.
12.) Holy shit.
13.) This is it. Everything changes after this. No more buying TOMS to make myself feel good. Time to save some people.
14.) Still crying. Might wear that bracelet. Definitely PMSing. Should I adopt?
15.) Where’s my wallet? Wait. Before I donate, I should turn to the Internet for opinions.
16.) Never go to the Internet if you want to stay inspired. Thanks, Jezebel.
17.) That kid is never going to sleep in his own bed again. Good luck making another baby.

Despite the Internet’s natural cynicism kind of ruining it for me, you should watch this movie–someplace where it’s okay for you to weep.

I only lived in Portland for two years, although it’s hard to imagine that so many bad things happened in such a short about of time. Most of the bad things that happened to me there were a direct result of my actions–or, more precisely, a direct result of my alcohol consumption, which was high, though in no way atypical in Portland. Actually, not all of the bad things were a direct result of my decision to, say, quit a full-time job with benefits and a company cell phone because working before noon was incompatible with my hangover. There was, for instance, the time the sewage main in my apartment building backed up into the drain in my bathtub, which felt like the city itself was shitting on me. This situation certainly wasn’t helped by drinking all day while I waited for the plumber–I peed in the alley beside my building in full daylight, twice–but most of the other bad shit was my fault. Still, even though I now recognize that it was me with the problem, not Portland, I find the love-affair everyone under fifty and to the left of Congress has with the city an annoying reminder of two really bad years. For this reason, I avoided watching the first season of Portlandia, which seemed like a TV version of a Keep Portland Weird bumper sticker: tacky, self-congratulatory, and, like the city itself, not really funny. But after reading Margaret Talbot’s recent New Yorker profile of Portlandia creators Carrie Brownstein–the former guitar player from Sleater Kinney–and Fred Armisen–the not-famous guy from SNL–I decided to try it out. Besides, it’s been four years since I moved and it’s not as if Portland broke up with me, right? I mean, I’m the one who left. Surely I could handle a few hours of Portlandia landscapes–which look nothing like the city for the ten months of the year when it is choked by drizzle–without collapsing into my dislike for the city, which started soon after my girlfriend kicked me and my drinking problem out.

Portlandia is a sketch comedy show with Brownstein and Armisen doing caricatures of Portland’s subcultures. You have the ultra-feminists, the fixed-gear cyclists, the dumpster-divers, and players in an adult hide-n-seek league acting, respectively, dogmatic, obnoxious, disgusting, and infantile. The sketches are all pretty much the same: take a stereotype and stretch it to the extreme. Make the people who quiz servers about the origin of their chicken leave the table to check out the chicken’s free-range home for themselves. Take the couple who pickles everything and make them pickle everything. This formula was funny for a minute before I got bored and started tallying the number of times I wrecked my bike on the streetcar tracks after getting shitfaced with a bunch of strangers when I lived in Portland. Better than the actual show is synopsis from Talbot, who writes that it’s about “campaigners against any theoretical attempt to bring the Olympics to Portland and animal lovers so out of touch that they free a pet dog tied up outside a restaurant,” which does sound pretty funny.

What should be enjoyable about Portlandia is that, even as a farce, it shows a place not so different from many other left-leaning cities and towns. Sure, Portland is quirky with it’s sanctioned pillow fights and double-decker bikes, but it’s no quirkier than Asheville, where I periodically attended college while dumpster diving everything from bagels to sushi, working in a lesbian bookstore, and judging women who shaved their armpits. Portlandia could be about Carborro, North Carolina, where I moved after Portland: a town of 20,000 people that passed a resolution opposing the Iraq War and where a completely unqualified transgendered woman came close to winning the 2008 mayoral race because how cool would it be to have a trans mayor? Portland’s just not that different. It may be known for it’s locavore movement and the multitude of drummers with tattoos of inanimate objects, but you see just as many toasters with wings on peoples’ biceps and Eat Local tote-bags at the farmer’s market in Durham, North Carolina, where the hot social event is vegan brunch at the queer bar. But more so than yogis and cyclists and kombucha babies, what cities like Portland and Asheville, Carrboro and Durham, San Francisco and Austin have in common is an immense love of self. People are just so proud to live in all these places. And this is what I dislike about Portlandia: the show pokes fun at hipsters and freegans and earnestness itself, but it does so while patting itself on the back for being just so special.

The sketches that succeed do so because they are less about Portland and more about Portlandia’s audience. One of my favorites is “Did You Read That,” in which Brownstein and Armisen battle each other across a table: Did read that thing in the New Yorker last week about how golf is an analogy for marriage? Did you read the thing in McSweeney’s comparing cd tracks and album tracks? Did you read that thing in Mother Jones? Did you read that thing in Spin? Paste? Dwell? The New York Times? The Wall Street Journal? The phone book? That fortune cookie? Those menus? As someone who frequently–though with embarrassment–starts conversations with, “So I was reading this piece in the New Yorker,” this skit made me laugh. It was, after all, about me. And that’s why Portlandia appeals to people: we all like to see ourselves. The same people who are laughing at “We Can Pickle That!” are people who actually can pickle that. But I don’t pickle and I’m not vegan; I haven’t dumpster-dived since college and I’ve been shaving my armpits for years. So maybe that’s why I dislike Portland and Portlandia–they represent a type of person who I fundamentally am not: those with optimism and a passion for their home and the honest belief that what the world needs is more birds on things.

I didn’t start crying when the boss told me that I was fired because I was stoned and wouldn’t have comprehended the gravity of the situation even if I hadn’t smoked my tear ducts shut in the parking lot before clocking in. The stomach-dropping terror of being unemployed in an economy where it takes three interviews and a master’s degree to get a job removing gum from picnic tables didn’t come until later. My first concern was that I was way too high to drive. It’s possible that my boss knew this, but I hope he took my impassive face as a sign that I was calmly processing the information and would save us both the embarrassment of getting upset or even asking why. There was no need for explanation: while I wasn’t always stoned at work, I was always bad at work, and so getting fired was as shocking as being late, which I was that morning and every other. While I’m good at a number of things—I can change a flat tire, make delicious potato-leek soup, and know all the state capitals—work is not one of them. This position, personal assistant to a corporate executive, required a level of attention to detail I just don’t have, which was clear when I emailed a client that my boss was “rubbing a little behind” but would be there ASAP. And so, unsurprised, I nodded my head when my boss asked if I understood and then shook it when he offered me a cardboard box to pack my things in. I could have used the box but holding the contents of my office—a desk lamp and three five-pound bags of peanut M&Ms—awkwardly in my arms seemed less humiliating, as though my co-workers wouldn’t notice that I was being escorted out of the building as long as I didn’t leave with my things in a cardboard box.

When I got home, the crushing weight of rejection settled in. This wasn’t a new feeling. The first time I was fired was my freshman year of college when I worked the circulation desk at the library. It was dull and paid poorly but required no skills beyond stamping books, so I should have been able to keep this job even with lunchtime marijuana breaks in the faculty women’s bathroom that no one ever used. Everything was fine for the first month of the semester, but one day before work, I stole what I thought was Vicodin from my roommate’s stash to treat a raging freshman-year hangover. The pill turned out to be prescribed to my roommate’s dog, who was put on meds after biting the mailman. It cured my hangover because I was too high to think about my headache, but I also became a twitchy mess, unable to sit down, much less stamp books and use my inside voice. I tried to work through the panic attack for approximately three minutes before giving up and hiding in the bathroom for the remainder of my shift. My boss, who was shaped like a Lego man and stopped liking me when I asked if he learned to shush people in graduate school, fired me from outside the bathroom door. Now, here I was, a decade older and dismissed again.

I had enough in savings to cover my rent and bills for about a month and I’d surely qualify for food stamps, but without income, I’d have no money for essentials like weed and Redbox. This was bad. It was also nearly a month ago, and I haven’t found another job yet. I’m so convinced of my inability to get hired anywhere that I haven’t actually applied for any jobs. I get to the part on applications where you check the box allowing your prospective employer to verify your last place of employment, and think, what’s the point? Even my friends have stopped pretending to be job references for me. When I asked my neighbor to serve as a reference, to tell just a few minor lies, namely that I managed her bakery and did a good job of it, she looked at me sadly and said maybe if I hadn’t been so late picking her up at the airport last week she would have but just didn’t feel comfortable now.

Even if I had good references, I don’t know what I want to do for a living. When I think about my dream job, I picture what I’m doing right now—still in my pajamas at three in the afternoon, eating cupcakes bought with food stamps and searching the Internet for videos of three-year-old violin prodigies. If I weren’t required to make a living—if I married up or won a game show—I’d happily spend my days sleeping till 11, maybe going to yoga or for a bike ride if I felt especially ambitious, smoking weed all day, and spending lots of time making elaborate grilled cheese sandwiches. But with no prospects, references, or even a middle-class girlfriend to pay the rent, I’ve had to look for other ways to make money since I got fired.

I’d long seen advertisements in the local paper seeking ADHD smokers for a drug study. Despite earlier periods of unemployment and poverty, I’d never applied before because I’d never thought of myself as a smoker. Maybe I was in denial, like the man who spends Sundays after church with his wife at Atlanta bath houses yet insists he’s straight, but soon after I bought my first pack of cigarettes a decade ago I decided it doesn’t count if you brush your teeth after every one and so never considered myself a smoker. With this latest layoff, however, the $930 payment for study participation made calling myself a smoker worth it and so I signed up.

I’d never been diagnosed with ADHD before, but it didn’t seem like it would be hard to fake, and considering that I showed up for my screening appointment a day early, I didn’t even need to fidget much to be convincing. The study involved taking either Ritalin or a placebo for several months and maybe, I thought, it would change my life. Maybe I really do have ADHD and Ritalin would cure it, make me a workaholic, an alpha female, driven and ambitious and not too distracted by the squirrel digging a hole outside my window to finish this sentence. I hoped I didn’t get the placebo.

My first appointment went well, at least at first. I did fine on the intelligence test and my physical exam was normal and the staff psychiatrist thought I was plenty ADHD after I started pacing around his office. Unfortunately, the screening process also involved a drug test, which I failed. The research assistant, who seemed as disappointed as I was, told me that I was a perfect candidate and asked if I would be willing to lay off the weed for two weeks and then coming back to re-take the drug test. Sure, I said. Two weeks without pot might clear my head a bit, give my brain cells some fresh air, repair the damage of a stoned adulthood. If nothing else, abstinence would lower my tolerance, which, after years of daily use, was at near-Rastafarian levels. Besides, with no late-night runs to the grocery store for frozen pizza and Cheetos, I’d even save food stamps.

I took abstinence seriously for the first week, but I didn’t like it. I felt no surge of energy or ambition and I was no better at crosswords sober than I was stoned. I was bored. When you’re unemployed, time is your enemy. You have too much time and not enough money to make it interesting. Pot cures this. You have all the time in the world and you don’t notice it passing because the square of sunlight shining through your window is just so interesting to look at. Being stoned makes me okay with being bored, and so after a week of discontent sobriety, I sold a few quarts of plasma and spent the money on a bag of pot. I’d just get a non-stoner friend to donate clean urine before my appointment.

The hardest part of smuggling urine into a drug test is the temperature—the sample must be within three degrees of body temperature—and so the morning of my appointment, I woke up early and made a hot-water bath for my urine sample, which was stored in a Tylenol bottle in the fridge. I then tucked it into my underwear to keep it warm. Walking with a Tylenol bottle of someone else’s urine between your legs is uncomfortable, but $930 would keep me happily unemployed for another few months. And it worked—my urine tested negative for pot. Unfortunately, my urine also tested negative for nicotine, which indicated that either I wasn’t actually a cigarette smoker or that I’d cheated on my drug test. Either way, I was out of the study, and miserably so. As I left the clinic, the research assistant gave me the same sad look my neighbor did when I asked her to be a job reference, a look that says, Shame. She had such potential.

Since then, I’ve looked into other drug studies. Getting a flu shot and snorting broccoli spores will cover my phone bill and an eighth of weed; having my blood drawn 28 times in 90 minutes will get me a burrito and laundry money; and taking a non-FDA-approved HIV medication, having two vaginal biopsies, and spending 48 hours prone in a hospital bed will cover my rent for three months. But the real money, I’ve heard, is in egg donation. I’m healthy and educated and above average height, and so, in theory, my eggs are worth a lot, but what would I write on that application? That my place of employment is this clinic and my job is selling my own body parts? Even if prospective buyers were impressed at my master’s degree, my police record and stints in rehab would likely make my eggs even sold at a discount seem too much a risk. Besides, does the world need more people like me? Even with attentive child-rearing, there’s no guarantee that a kid made from my eggs would be anything more than I am: unambitious and unemployable, with the long-term malaise of the longtime pot smoker, with friends and bosses who shakes their heads and think, What happened? She had such potential.

Tomorrow will be exactly a month since I collected my things and was escorted out of my office. No game shows or rich women or couples desperate for a baby have come calling, so I suppose it’s time to start from the beginning, to look for jobs that don’t require references, and hope that I find something before I run out of drug studies to do and plasma to sell and am left with nothing but an empty jar of pot and all the potential in the world.

Because I listen to NPR all the time, taking breaks only during Car Talk and pledge drives, apocalyptic stories from what’s happening in the economy are always in my head. Until recently, our collapsing economy hasn’t bothered me more than any of the other terrible things happening in the world, for instance, the deaths of starving African children and Amy Winehouse. It’s not that I’m wealthy and immune to the economy’s failure; on the contrary, I’m as solvent as the guy on the Swift Street on-ramp who holds a sign declaring that his name is Keith, he’s homeless, and he hopes you have a blessed day. I make precisely $30,233 below the median household income in this country, but my household is just me and I’m cheap. I take the bus, steal toiletries from hotels, and never eat organic. I’ve been able to get by despite refusing to work more than twenty hours a week because I’d rather spend my time watching Law & Order reruns, but my indifference about the economy changed to concern after I fell asleep during a meeting at work a few weeks ago. I only nodded off for a few moments–my head drooping to the side, my mouth hanging open–before a coworker nudged me and whispered that I should get a cup of coffee, which I later spilled all over the conference room table. Afterward, when told that falling asleep during a meeting is a very big no-no and my job was now in jeopardy, I was genuinely surprised. What’s the problem, I thought? I slept my way through college and did just fine.

If I can keep this job for a few more weeks, I’ll hit my one year anniversary. An entire year of steady employment will be a record as I tire of jobs quickly and either stop showing up or get fired after a few months. Given my work history, it was surprising that I was offered this job in the first place. My resume is spotty, with long gaps during the times I’ve collected unemployment and played old Nintendo games instead of sending out resumes. I’ve had eighteen jobs in my dozen years in the workforce, and most have been so short-lasting that they aren’t worth the ink on my resume. The last time I was looking for jobs, I realized that I would never get one that didn’t involve a hairnet and latex gloves with an honest resume, and so I made one up. A six-month internship became a four-year full-time job, complete with promotions and pay raises. Helping a friend make a mixed tape for his girlfriend got listed under “Volunteer Experience.” Blogging became freelance writing and a weekend in Cancun became a Spanish immersion class. It worked, I got the job, and I’ve spent the past year in my cubicle, trying to block my computer screen so no one can see that I’m looking at baby pandas instead of spreadsheets. But if I can’t rectify this situation, a year is all I’ll get before I go back to unemployment and old Nintendo games.

My inability to keep a job started from the beginning, when I got fired from my only babysitting gig for locking the kids out of the house after they refused take their baths and yelling through the window that I was eating their ice cream. My next job, at Taco Bell, lasted until the manager handed me a spray bottle and pointed at the men’s room, at which point I decided working for a corporation meant selling my soul and walked out the door. After my day at Taco Bell, I explained to my parents that fast food was disenfranchising. Proud of their budding socialist, my parents didn’t ground me as long as I promised to find something else. I decided, however, that not working was better than working and I started what has been my employment path since.

Education is an excellent way to avoid work. It also provides buildings with heat and air conditioning, plenty of events with complimentary food, and money that seems free until the government starts garnishing your wages. And so, despite my dislike of academics, whose purposefulness I envy, I decided to go to graduate school after I was fired from an art gallery for my liberal interpretation of punctuality. It was mostly the prospect of student loans that convinced me to enroll, so I sent in my application to the only program I could get into, one with notoriously easy classes and college-affiliated happy hour three times a week. Although I cared little about my grades, I thought of graduate school as a job and student loans as my income. I even went so far as to purposely fail summer school because I needed a loan but couldn’t bear to spend my summer in a classroom.

I was in graduate school for almost two years before I quit. Characteristically, I bungled dropping out by writing on my withdrawal form that I was quitting because graduate school made me want to kill myself. I was kidding, of course, but I received a phone call from the octogenarian dean hours after submitting the form, panicked that I was lining up pills or inching toward a ledge. I explained that if anything made me want to kill myself it would be far more interesting than graduate school and thanked her for a two year reprieve from employment. After that, it was back to the workforce.

When I told my friends about my current situation at work, everyone advised me to buckle down, to stop looking at pandas online, to stay awake at meetings and make myself indispensable. But working hard is as natural to me tanning, and I’m Irish. No matter how hard I try, my attention lasts for three minutes of data entry before I find myself Googling chow chow puppies dyed to resemble teddy bears. Contrary to everyone’s advice, after my boss’s ultimatum–shape up or ship out to the bread line–I decided instead that I would use my well-cultivated ability to bullshit to save my job. It wouldn’t start showing up early and staying late: I would make my boss like me so much that he would employ me just to keep him company.

The biggest barrier to my mission is politics. Along with a life-size cut out of Derek Jeter and a framed photograph of Alex Rodriguez, my boss’s office is filled with Republican propaganda. He even covered his company-owned laptop with a sticker readingSomewhere in Kenya a village is missing its idiot, which seems unfair considering I have to cover the DYKE LOVE tattoo on my arm at work. Given a stronger economy, one with even low-paying jobs, I wouldn’t work for someone whose hates liberals even more than he hates the Red Sox, but I need this job and so I decided to make my boss think we have common values. I started on Monday morning when I stopped by his office to say hello. I asked how his weekend was and he said it was good. Went a church picnic on Saturday and taught Sunday school the next morning. I too went to church, I said. This was a lie. My faith in atheism is as strong as my faith in gravity, and the last time I entered a church was to steal a can of Sprite from the kitchen of St. Mary’s when I was twelve. When my boss, who first looked impressed when I told him I chose church over brunch, asked where I went, I said the first thing that came to mind: AME Zion. He looked at me oddly just as I remembered that AME Zion is a black church. Don’t you have work to do?, he said. And shut the door on your way out.

Later that week, I further sabotaged my chances of gaining job security when I accidentally sent my boss a text message meant for a friend about scheduling a meeting for a club we started. Our club, the Federation for the Advancement of Gay Girls Learning, organizes workshops for members to learn new skills and goes by the acronym FAGGL. Lez get together to talk FAGGL this week, I wrote. Your homo or mine? Perhaps if my boss, who applies words like “bandwidth” to people and tries to seem hip by cursing, thought I was making a homophobic joke he would have warmed to me, but he has eyes and so he knows I’m gay. He used to point his fingers like cocked gun and call out Rockstar! when he walked past my cubicle. Now he just walks by.

My situation is precarious, and for this I am scared. I am victim of our national carelessness but mostly of my own carelessness. No longer can I get by with hotel toiletries and the occasional part time job. There are so many people in this same situation that I would be competing with laid off teachers and lawyers and people who actually finished graduate school for even menial jobs. After years of listening to the bad news about the economy, the Recession is finally real. For the first time in my year of employment–for the first time ever–I dread the day I’ll go to work and leave with my things in a box big enough to hold my new pictures of Ronald Regan and the cross I tacked over my desk, but not big enough to live in after I walk to the Swift Street on-ramp with my own sign: My name is Katie, I’m homeless, and I hope you have a blessed day.

My therapist wants to talk about my drinking problem, which makes me feel like I have a drinking problem, so I interrupt her and say that my fear of upholstered furniture is getting worse. I wonder aloud if they makes pills for this phobia. I could use more pills for my stash, store them along with unopened bottles of Celexa and Lamictal and Adderall and Flexerall. My gag reflex, the strongest muscle in my body, is too sensitive for pills and drinking is self-medication enough, so I don’t touch drugs. Still, I fill prescriptions and store them with my other survival gear, all part of my plan for the end-of-days. When the cell towers collapse and the oceans dry up and the black market replaces the neighborhood grocery, I’m going to trade my uppers and downers for gasoline and booze and be glad I never got hooked on pills. My therapist tells me to make an appointment with my doctor and changes the subject to my drinking problem.

While I can ignore my drinking problem as long as my hangover isn’t too bad, my fear of upholstered furniture is undeniable. And unlike my alleged drinking problem, I feel no shame about this psychological glitch. This is a completely rationale fear. Have you ever considered the possibility of contracting lice from the headrest in a city bus? Think about that next time you decide it’s too cold to ride your bike.

Despite the common sense of being wary of upholstered furniture, it is rare phobia, less common even then papaphobia, or fear of the Pope, who obviously can’t hurt you from inside his bullet-proof box. The number of Google hits for “fear of upholstered furniture” is only sightly higher than the number for “at home lobotomy,” but this problem causes me serious anxiety. Unlike drinking, which I can combine with virtually any task, my phobia limits what I can do. It makes travel especially difficult. I think about taking the overnight train from North Carolina to New York to see friends and family brave enough to move north, sleep the whole way and wake up already there, but I couldn’t possibly stand up for the 500 mile ride. Besides, I’d be more comfortable sleeping on a pile of bricks than a hotel mattress, so overnight trips are out.

Unfortunately, my fear of upholstered furniture isn’t limited to upholstered furniture. More accurately, I have a fear of any cloth-like material people I don’t know have touched. I’d have to be running naked down the interstate after an oil spill before I’d put on used pants, and because I can’t afford anything new, I spend a lot of time hand-washing my one outfit, stretching the fabric’s lifetime through fashions and fads.

It’s the smell of second-hand stores that really gets me, a smell like slow waiting rooms with legs stuck to vinyl seats. And, like venturing into an illegal absinthe bar, you have no control over what you’ll encounter at second-hand stores. Unlike illegal absinthe bars, however, you don’t get the benefit of alcohol. In a real-life worst case scenario, a friend of mine dug through a mountain of other peoples’ trash at a Goodwill that sells by the pound, and instead of the vintage Calvin Klein windbreaker she was hoping for, she found a giant flesh-toned dildo with a foreskin and veins. After hearing this story, I started crossing the street to avoid the building, as though it were an obnoxious panhandler I was sick of refusing.

Several years ago, I moved across the country and, bringing only the things I could fit in an small but adorable suitcase, I had to set up an entirely new household. Had this been a household of one, I would have furnished my new home with a few folding chairs, but my girlfriend and I moved together. Despite my argument that sleeping side-by-side on yoga mats would be good for our backs as well as spiritually healing, she wanted furniture. My girlfriend got her way, but because we could barely afford the gas to Ikea, much less anything in the store, we had to turn to used goods if we weren’t going to eat sitting on the floor and holding bowls to our mouths. We slept on a Wal-Mart air mattress for several months before we could afford a bed and, desperate for something that wouldn’t deflate in the night, my girlfriend ignored my panic attacks and bought a used mattress, which should be illegal and is in most states, even ones where you can marry your cousin.

There were more danger zones in that house. I could deal with our used dresser as long as the drawer liners where in place, but the living room furniture made me pull out my application to the most spartan monastery I could find with wireless. The couch became safe after I splurged on a washable cover, but I couldn’t breath near the chair my girlfriend picked up at a cheap hotel’s liquidation sale without my inhaler. After a few months of sitting on the cold floor while the chair sat empty, I decided that it would be safe to use if it was covered by the quilt my mom gave me after my power was turned off one winter. The chair was a comfortable break from the floor, but once the quilt was on the chair, I couldn’t bring it to bed. It was the chair blanket, not the bed blanket. We couldn’t possibly sleep under something that had touched the hotel chair. My girlfriend disagreed, but I bought her a hot water bottle and a sleeping bag and she forgave my neuroses.

I moved out of that house years ago, and my home now is furnished entirely by friends and family. Things that are used by people I care about generally get a free pass from my rules. I have a futon from a friend who moved to San Francisco and a chair from my boss and a mattress from my sister, which is especially safe because we have DNA in common. The only furniture I avoid is a couch given to me by a friend. Considering that this friend wears vintage shoes without socks on, I probably should have realized her couch was rescued from Craigslist, but I didn’t ask until I had taken my front door off it’s hinges to move it inside. I kept the couch, but I sit on the floor instead, stare at from across the room, imagining afternoon naps and train tickets north and warm bus rides on cold days.

Before the session ends, my therapist tells me that I need to change my routine, to do something everyday that scares me, to start to fix my problems, and I tell her that I will. I might run from my drinking problem for as long as I live, but when I get home, I’m going to lay on that couch without even a sheet to protect me from it’s second-hand fabric. I’m going to lay on it so long that it becomes mine, as safe as clean towels and new pillows. This fear started small, with visions of lice on headrests and sex-toys in piles of clothes, and I’m going to sit on that couch until it’s small again. I won’t be the like woman who is so terrified of footprints in her carpet that she drags a vacuum behind her as she walks through her house; the woman who thinks about those footprints in her carpet all the time and eventually avoids the floor entirely, jumping from couch to chair to doormat. I won’t be the woman who can’t leave the house because everything out there is so terrifying, so toxic, so out of control. I’ll get over this fear and I won’t find myself in the middle of my living room someday, not touching anything, with a closet full of pills and nothing to sit on but a case of booze.

The last time I was this ugly was during my sixth-grade braces and bowl cut phase. It’s partly my outfit (denim on denim), my pedicure (chipped), and my hair (flat, frizzy) but it’s mostly my face that has made people avoid eye contact with me since I wrecked my bike/face a few days ago. It was my first sober wreck since I got my training wheels off and the most damaging yet. The right side of my face is covered in road rash. It just looks like moderate sunburn on my cheeks, but my jawline reveals what’s underneath all those layers of skin: flesh and blood and quite a bit of puss. But as ugly as my face right now, it’s as milk-smooth compared to my hands (which look like they were repeatedly burned with cigarettes like I’m a mob snitch or an enemy combatant), and my knees; one is a deep purple quickly moving to green and the other is covered in a delicate yellow scab that keeps getting ripped off by my jeans.

It’s been three days since the wreck and I’ve been trying take the correct steps to ensure a speedy and successful healing, but the wounds are deep and I fear scars will be difficult to prevent. Besides, I refuse to pay money for things I can’t ingest (bacon, Perrier, drugs) or live in (house, car) and so I’m using the antibacterial soap in my office bathroom instead of Neosporin. With the exception of my face, I won’t be upset if these injuries leave permanent reminders on my skin. Additional scars may even lend some symmetry to my body; my right elbow will match my left as it hasn’t since I drunkenly biked into a stop sign a few years ago and was helped to my feet by a bum, whom I thanked and gave a quarter. My right shin will now mirror it’s counterpart, with a long scar running below my knee from the first time I shaved my legs, unaware that water and soap is key. A few more scars are just a few more scars on a body covered in them.

While most of my scars are the direct result of careless actions like the aforementioned bicycle and body hair accidents, my earliest scars come from being born imperfect. I’m not missing a leg or an arm and all of my body parts are in roughly the correct places, but I was born with a tumor on the middle finger of my left hand. After many operations to remove the tumor, it’s not something you would notice if we weren’t comparing the size or our hands or the lengths of our fingers, but it doesn’t take too close inspection to see. The skin on my middle finger (or my fat finger, as my family calls it), is thick and pink and there’s a dime-sized lump on the side. The skin itself is actually from my hip, grafted onto my fat finger after it turned purple and started bursting blood vessels when I was five (which, surprisingly, wasn’t painful, and since I wasn’t whining and they had to work, my parents wrapped my hand in a dish towel and sent me to school the next day.) The subsqueuent surgery was not entirely successful, and there were other attempts to improve my finger’s appearance. One doctor, afraid that my tumor would turn malignant, advised my parents to have my middle finger amputated. My dad, tired of sleeping on chairs pushed together in hospital rooms every time a surgeon tried to fix my finger, thought amputation a good idea. As he told me, “It would have looked perfectly fine but you would have had trouble counting past nine.” My mom wanted a second opinion and the surgeries continued until my finger settled into it’s current state–ugly and asymmetrical, but still there.

Besides an imperfect finger, I was also born with an imperfect skull. This isn’t because of a mutation like my tumor, but because my mom went into labor very suddenly and as my dad drove to the hospital, my head started to crown. He pulled the silver Dodge Omni into the parking lot of Pedro’s Fine Mexican Food and pushed me back in. I’m convinced that this is why the top of my skull is flat. No one else agrees with me, but as my twin sister’s head is perfectly round, I’m sure it was my impatience to enter the world that flattened my head.

Despite these two imperfections from birth–one of which is an advantage for carrying things on my head–and being prone to alcohol-induced bike wrecks, my body has been good to me. I’ve gone through periods of drinking more alcohol than water and yet I’m very healthy. I’ve chain smoked and stayed up for days and once took anti-anxiety pills meant for aggressive dogs and yet I haven’t had a cold since smoking pot in a walk-in fridge three years ago. I’ve gone years between exercise more taxing than throwing darts at bars and I eat food made in New Jersey chemical plants. Maintaining good health through things like food and exercise is far less interesting to me than guinea-pigging a new strain of LSD or sampling every whiskey in the bar and going for a bike ride, yet my body stays surprisingly fit. I still have a runner’s build even though the last time I ran was to the jungle gym in third grade. I can swim and climb and do pushups and throw a baseball. And until recently, I only had to think about exercising to lose weight. As I’ve aged, however, I’ve realized that my butt is going to settle and my hips are going to expand and my boobs–small enough now to seem impervious to gravity–are not going to hold their own weight forever.

It was this concern that led to my bike wreck last week. I was attempting to exercise for the first time since my gym membership lapsed two years ago. My bike was newly-tuned and it was a nice Sunday afternoon, not so hot as to make central air the only way to happiness, so I decided to go for a ride. I made it about two miles before I wrecked. It wasn’t debris in the road or a swerving car or margaritas at happy hour that caused this accident, it was my iPod, which shuffled to my least favorite Beyonce song. As I reached into my pocket to skip to the next song, I lost control and skidded to the ground. I hit the flat part of my head first and then my face, hands, elbows, and knees scrapped along the road. Thankfully, my bike was unharmed, without even a flat tire, and I wasn’t so hurt that I couldn’t get back on. As I rode the two miles home, blood streamed from my chin down my shirt and onto my bike. It dripped onto my front tire left a track of red on the road.

There have been many accidents, some dramatic, some too pedestrian to clearly recall. I’ve forgotten which scars came for which wreck. I can’t remember if the L-shaped the scar on my left elbow is from last summer when I fell off my bike on the way home from a lesbian bar–a damp place where all the women wear cargo pants and Life is Good shirts–and was stopped by a cop, who put my bike in the trunk of his car and drove me home. Or was it from a few winters ago when I wrecked on my way home from the Egyptian Room, a converted pawnshop with cheap drinks and bars on the windows? I know the scar above my lip came from my most expensive accident, which broke my front tooth and left me with a scab below my nose that looked like a Charlie Chaplin mustache from a distance. That particular accident occurred on Inauguration Day 2008 when bars opened early to celebrate our new president. I took advantage of this occasion for morning drinking and tripped off the sidewalk walking home. I didn’t even attempt to break my fall and my hands and knees, those parts of the body that most often bare these superficial wounds, were unscathed. A taxi home would have saved me the pain and the dental bills, but I can neither ingest nor live in a cab, and so I walked, and I tripped, and I spit out my front tooth on the street. As I sat in the dentist chair later, my mouth forced open with plastic things that reminded me of a speculum, I told myself that was be the last time I got too drunk to get home healthy.

That L-shaped scar is not, I am sure, from my scariest bicycle accident, which left me with a only a busted chin when it could have killed me. I didn’t ride away from that accident but was taken to the ER by paramedics even as I argued that hitting my head on the road without a helmet was nothing a nightcap and a few hours of sleep couldn’t fix. After we got to the hospital, I gave the intake nurse a fake address and told her that my name was Jane Carney–my middle school nemesis who told everyone that I peed when I coughed–and left the hospital when no one was looking, bleeding and wearing a neck brace. The scar on my chin is visible only after a summer in the sun, but I have a blue hospital bracelet with my old enemy’s name on it to remind me of how very lucky I was that time and all the rest.

As I write this, the wound on my inner elbow badly burns. I hurt, and I’m ugly, but I’m glad that it was exercise and an iPod that caused this accident and not a half-dozen drinks. I’m trying at last to be as good to my body as it was been to me, to get scars from bike rides on Sunday afternoons instead of late at night, walking or riding or stumbling home with bloody knees and scrapped elbows and the continual promise that this accident will be the last. When these new scars are faded but still visible in certain lights, I’ll have no story to tell about sneaking out of the hospital or looking like Charlie Chaplin or being rescued by a bum, and when people ask me what happened, It was nothing, I’ll say. Just a bike wreck.