I am in my apartment. I am reading "The Hunger Games". It is riveting, just as my sister had advertized. Present tense. Short, snappy sentences. I had intended to read a few pages before dinner. It is now nearing 10 pm.
I hear a sudden series of sharp knocks that catapult me into awareness. Back from that Other World in my book, there is now a futon, an apartment. Hunger from skipping dinner. Thirst. Strange, persistent knocks. Ideas fill my head. Someone hanging a frame? My roommate, returned from her trip but unable to find her keys? This happy picture is discounted immediately. The knocks are not friendly, inquiring, or even insistent. They are angry and irregular and close by.
I ease onto my feet. There is an open window next to the stairwell that leads to the door. I move at an angle to remain unseen from the window. At the base of the house is a shadowed figure. It makes short violent strokes in the darkness.
It is the boy next door, whom I've never met. He has a rug draped across the railing of the porch. He is beating it with a thick wooden stick. Dust flies everywhere, illuminated by the porchlight.
I step back from the window. The room feels yellow and quiet and empty. I glance down the long dark corridor towards my bedroom. Nothing awaits me there but my nightmares.
Maybe reading this book wasn't such a great idea after all.
So I've been reading a book recommended by my mom (hi mom!) called "Crucial Conversations". The idea behind the book is that you should be able to have any conversation with anyone about anything, as long as you do it the right way. The key is to not let your emotions be your master, and to listen carefully and watch for cues from the other person. After all, a "crucial conversation" is defined by when the stakes are high and emotions run strong.
They divide people into two catagories, people who become angry and defensive during crucial conversations (violence), and people who shut down (silence). I usually shut down and withdraw from the conversation, mostly because I know that if I do say what's really important to me, my voice will shake like I'm about to cry. Usually because I am.
So the other day I ran into my first opportunity to practice my Crucial Conversations skills. I was over at my Angle's house helping her move. She and her roommates had to move at different times, so they promised to clean out different parts of the apartment so that the last people weren't left with all the dirty work. The roommates that had left before were supposed to have cleaned the kitchen... but they forgot one big thing, which was the REFRIGERATOR. The refrigerator was FILTHY and full of out-of-date food. My friend looked at it in despair. I offered to clean it for her. Gross, yes, but that's what friends are for, eh?
She picked out a few things that were hers. There was still one roommate left, but she hardly ever used the fridge (she had her own mini-fridge) and Angle didn't see anything that she recognized as hers, so she told me to just toss all of it. After all, it was mostly condiments, and they could be replaced. There was salad, which looked a little off and was cheap, and lots and lots of yogurt, much of which was out of date.
So I took a trash bag and filled it up with jars and containers, not bothering to dump anything out. Then I wiped down the entire fridge and started over with the freezer and a different trash bag. I dragged the entire incredibly heavy bag down to the curb. I was a hero.
Her other roommate came back. I proclaimed what a hero I was and showed her the empty refrigerator. She was FURIOUS.
"WHERE IS ALL MY STUFF?" she said.
Man, she was furious. "My SPINACH... my... ARRRGH I really wish you HADN'T DONE THAT!!!"
I was a little offended. How much stuff could she really have had? How much would it cost to replace spinach? It's not like someone could have made a meal out of what was left. And what about, "Hey, thanks for cleaning my incredibly filthy refrigerator that didn't even belong to you--- you are a HERO!!" ???
All these things went on in my head and in a small side conversation I had with Angle. Reluctantly I thought of the things I had read in the book. She was reacting with violence. I was reacting with silence (and a little bit of muttering under my breath). Niether of us was really talking to the other. So how to fix? First I had to think: what did I want for this relationship? Well, I wanted us to end things on a good note, because I wouldn't be seeing her much longer after she moved out and we used to be fairly close. Second, I had to think: why would a reasonable, rational person act the way she just did? I deduced that there must be other stuff going on with her right now, and there must have been something more important in the food I threw away than spinach.
She came back in and I apologized for throwing away her food. Legitimately I could have blamed it all on Angle, who told me to throw it away, but it is always better to apologize and it was no more Angle's fault than mine. I told her that I didn't realize it was important. I wanted her to know that my intentions were never to be careless or to make her upset, just to do them a favor by cleaning the refrigerator. She started almost crying and said, "It's just one thing after another..." [I later found out that the first two roommates, who were moving into the same place as she was, had rented a large moving truck that morning and moved all of their stuff into their new place without telling her, leaving her to move all of her stuff to the same place using 50 car trips instead of one trip in a truck]. It eventually came out that she had just chosen everything she wanted to keep out of her mini-fridge and put it in the big fridge so she could clean the former, which is why Angle hadn't recognized any of it. I explained the misunderstanding to Angle, who softened and switched from being defensive [I'm the only one who cleans this place!!] to apologetic [sorry, it wasn't your responsibility to clean the kitchen, I guess I went overboard because the others shirked their responsibilities].
I started thinking while cleaning the cupboards and I realized that I had put all the stuff in the bag as if I was going to take it to another house... I hadn't mixed it with anything dirty or gross. I suggested that I go outside and take a look through the bag and see if I couldn't retrieve any of the things she really wanted. She probably wouldn't want the spinach back, but anything in a bottle could be rescued. "My mother's homemade blueberry jam," she said immediately.
Ah. Mother's homemade blueberry jam. That was a bit more important than spinach, and did rather justify how upset she had been when she found out it was gone. I looked through the bag and we ended up saving the jam, some yogurt, some pickles, and other harmless things that hadn't been sitting on the sidewalk long enough to spoil. She was incredibly grateful and her whole demeanor changed. We offered to help her move her stuff in our cars but she said she had it under control, and we left the apartment expressing our sadness that we would be apart.
It's summertime, and the livin's easy.
It's always been "cool" to say that summer is not your favorite season. Usually you'd pick fall for the leaves or spring for the flowers, and if you're especially "hip" and "alternative" you'd say your favorite season is winter. Yep, it depends on where you live. Fall in Colorado was always my favorite because the weather is perfect and the rays of the sun slant down through the trees onto the soccer field in the late afternoon. In SoCal there weren't really any seasons except that the summer was a bit too hot to live without air conditioning. But summer in Rhode Island is full of green leaves, beaches, blue skies, the smell of barbeque. The humidity wraps you up in its arms and bids you take a swim in the sea.
If if there was no winter in Rhode Island, I could live here forever.
SUMMER SUMMER SUMMER SUMMER SUMMER SUMMER! I wish it would never end! I'm already dreading winter! SUMMER! Stay here forever!!!! I love you!!
Let it be written that at 10:30am, Sunday, May 30th, 2010, at 26 years of age, Zanzibar H. Tanzania found her first GREY HAIR. Well. It was more "translucent" or "clear" than it was grey. But still.
A couple of weeks ago around Easter, my roommate's boyfriend hid chocolate eggs all over our apartment while we were gone. It was very cute and romantic, and my roommate was delighted to keep discovering new eggs in the strangest places. Inside our oven mitts, inside the vegetable-drawer in the fridge, above the doors, under cups, in the lamp (we luckily discovered that one before it melted all over the light bulb). When she found them she usually just put them back so that she could rediscover them again and again over time. Every corner of the apartment reminded us of him. Amusingly, some of the eggs were in places that she would obviously never look--- after all, my roommate very seldom has use for oven mitts and doesn't like vegetables.
My roommate and her boyfriend subsequently broke up.
She went around and retrieved all the eggs from every corner of our apartment and threw them away.
Today I ran out of pasta and I was rooting through my food cupboards to find another box. I found a half-empty one way at the back and poured out the pasta.
Two chocolate eggs were at the bottom.
I am glad my roommate doesn't eat spaghetti.