I’ve just finished my first day of nonstop apartment hunting, and amidst lots of apartments that had their advantages and disadvantages, I found two that I think would really work. One of them may very well be perfect, which is always a good feeling!

After my last trip that featured much driving around town to various [unaffordable] condos, this time, me, my car Olivia, and the Rhode Island road atlas that I may have stolen from Bob Mahoney the real estate agent from June, or possibly may have been given by him, well, the three of us seem to be learning the lay of the land in record time considering it seems to have been laid out by following an errant cow or sheep and laying road where they felt like walking sometime in the early 1700’s.

But who am I kidding!? You all know that I am actually totally in love with all these crazy old buildings. Someone about a hundred years ago seems to have sketched out a three story building with a bay window running up the entire front façade and two doors in the front porch and then sold this ingenious “three-family house” plan to every builder in the city because everywhere you go in the neighborhoods called East Side, Oak Hill, Federal Hill, Smith Hill, Armory District, College and so on you see this house. They are always hyphenated street numbers like “46-48 Carrington”; weird, since they contain three residences, not one or two. Some have been fixed up and repainted, some appear to be mere moments away from a spectacular collapse, but no matter since clones of this one house crop up, block after block, and the inside layout is recognizable too. I’ve been in two or three of them with their memorable “double-parlour”—two rooms joined by a large archway or column detailing, and seen countless more on ads I didn’t answer. “Double parlour” seems to be the shorthand code for “one of those weird tenements that are all over the place.” At that point, it just becomes a question of upkeep and location.

Anyway, renting continues apace. I have a lead or two. Meanwhile, there was also a half-cross-country trip to tell you about. Two and a half days by yourself in a car with an iPod for company gives rise to all kinds of thoughts. Here are a very few of them, typed out:

{this was written 45 minutes after I first arrived in Providence as I waited at a coffeeshop for the person who would hand over the key to Elise and Paige’s apartment, where I am staying until I find that elusive room of my own… hence the now-slightly-wrong dates.}

I feel like a fairly cosmopolitan person who can speak a few words in Beijing, Tokyo, or Berlin, I can get around in Paris or London, but I kid you not, the Poconos and Catskills in Pennsylvania and New York last night, the long drive through Connecticut, my few minutes in West Virginia-- all inflicted some serious culture shock on me.

I can’t explain it. The people sound and behave roughly the same (save for accents and terrible driving habits), but somehow the set just feels so different as to make the whole performance seem surreal. I felt like such a country bumpkin last night when I was shocked to find that the first motel I stopped at in northeastern Pennsylvania (I now recognize—too dangerously close to New York City) was $105. The next one—a Best Western of all middlebrow things—was $160. The shock and resignation that I would be driving through the night or sleeping in a rest stop aroused some pity in the desk clerk and she called ahead to Middletown, New York to a rival Howard Johnson to see whether the rates were any better. They were. Still more than twice as much as the previous night in Indiana cost me, but half the price of the edge of Penn’s Woods.

It’s tighter here. Not because of a higher population density or the age of the area, but the mere landscape causes a certain amount of claustrophobia—or whatever is the feeling of cramped-ness without the actual phobia. Lots of trees. Tons of trees. Hills that keep you hugged close to the earth. In Kansas just hurtling across the plain makes you a giant. Since Ohio, those plains are gone and the hills and trees have taken over. In Pennsylvania, I felt like the trees were holding the highway and traffic aloft, on the ridges of ocean like billows of land that must sink to impossible depths in the shade. In Connecticut, the road came lower, like skimming through the shallows that occasionally opened onto a history-pickled village. The place names corresponded easily and constantly to the book about Shakespeare that played to completion in my car. New London. Middlesex, Essex, Stratford, New Britain, Warwick…

I don’t know why the East Coast is a source of such disbelief to me, but it continues to amaze. Today one of the landlords showing me a flooded apartment (I was to “use my imagination” about how it would look soon), then asked me to go for coffee. This is the man that I thought hated me yesterday because I couldn’t understand him on the phone for the life of me. Every single thing he said I had to ask him to repeat, and again. And again. Until he was speaking sooooo sloooowly and had cut out soooo many words that you’d think *I* was the novice English speaker. So, apparently Konstantin didn’t hate me when he met me today. In fact, I can pinpont the moment: he says, “you’re studying at RISD?” I say, no, PhD in Theatre at Brown and boom. He is a different man.

He’s a salt-and-pepper headed, greybeard with a belly tucked into ironed blue jeans and loafers that click along the sidewalk in a distinctly un-American manner. He was interesting, so I climbed into his brand new Mercedes and went to coffee with him. He asked me do I drink. I say, sometimes. He say, “You smoke!? You do! I know you do!” I said, “Festroeker”…party smoker. He says, “you smoke pot?!” I say, “Mmm, not very often.” He likes my honesty. He doesn’t like Bill Clinton’s dishonesty. I ask where he’s from. He asks me to guess, so I guess Greece, which is apparently the popular guess. I’m stuck for the next guess. Finally he says “Georgia! …Not American Georgia.” To which I laugh and laugh.
We have to go to the gas station for Parliaments, then to Coffee Exchange where he buys me “anything I want.” Which turns out to be an iced latte. He asks if I think he’s doing all this to make me rent. He insists he is not. He says he’s not picking me up… at least I think he says this. He’s much easier to understand in person, but not everything comes through.
He makes a face about tattooed girls. Another girl is revealing a remarkable amount of rear end skin sitting in her chair and he says, “Female but not feminine.” I run a hand through the short hair of my semi-mohawk (it’s flattish today) and say I’m maybe not feminine either. He makes some distinction I don’t quite understand.
There’s a wedding ring on his left hand. I try out the three Russian phrases that I learned from a “Speak Russian” audio course on him. I recite the Russian I learned from my grandmother who has an MA in Slavic Language. An entire MA and she remembers only the beginning of a nursery rhyme (I will approximate my own poor pronunciation):

Pif, poof, oi yoi yoi.
Umarai-itz, zeitz kamoy.

Bang bang. Oh my.
The rabbit is dead.

Mimi recites this with gusto and an unmistakable tone of self-satisfaction at the drop of a hat. It’s obvious that she excelled at recitations as a schoolgirl and still longs for the approval it must have brought her.
Konstantin recognizes it instantly and laughs and laughs. He corrects my translation: the rabbit is dying, it’s not dead. I say it’s a strange poem. He says, no no, it’s for children at bedtime. I say that’s a scary thing to tell a child at night. Konstantin does not agree.

When it’s rather too close to my next appointment, we hop back in the car and he drops me off by Olivia. He wants to have dinner. I say I’m busy. [Lie.] He says lunch tomorrow. I say I have appointments. [mostly not a lie]. He says to plan around them. No no, I say. Then, stupid girl, I say “Tuesday.” He says do I call you or you call me? I say I call him. He tries to get me to promise.

Half an hour later I’m in the really good apartment. The one I think I’m going to go for. My phone rings; “private call.” In response to my hello, there is a sentence of Russian or possibly Georgian that I don’t understand. I immediately tell him I’m at a flat and I can’t talk. There is a big hurry. [this is true.] He apologizes and hangs up. As I think about this call later, I feel like I’ve deflated him. In my memory, Konstantin sounds deeply humiliated. I don’t know if this is true. I don’t know how to call him or not call him.

And that my friends, was today’s adventure. I hope you’re having adventures too. I’d love to hear about them.

I'm in Wheeling West Virginia at a coffee shop and thank the kamisama, Wheeling is as much as I could have hoped! (although I have admittedly spoken to only one West Virginian: the proprietor of the organic friendly and wireless providing coffeeshop that I happened upon when I went to see whether Wheeling could be all I hoped.)
For weeks I've been excitedly telling people that I get to drive through West Virginia (for all of about ten miles in the extreme northern panhandle) and I'm really excited because West Virginia sounds like banjos to me. Then I amend that I know it'll probably be Walmarts and autobody shops, but that I'm still unduly excited. And guess what (for those who haven't been to West Virginia)-- IT'S ACTUALLY DIFFERENT!
It's a hilly scruffy little town that feels like it's being swallowed not only by the billowy foothills, but by the irrepressible greenery that cloaks the hills too. It's weird and winding and has a bigass river that provides almost the only open space in the area.
This area (north Wheeling) that I'm sitting in is "Victorian old town" and it does really feel old and cramped and very, well, eastern. The scale is European, the feeling is English coal town.

I suppose I might hit the Walmart section of town on my way out, but at the moment I'm just so happy swaddled in the claustophobic streets and trees.

I say West Virginia rocks and damn the torpedoes.

I am a little bit in love with Noah Taylor.
Also, incidentally, I am in Centreville, Indiana and I may possibly be in the first motel room I've ever slept in all alone. I can't remember an earlier time. I guess that means I'm a grownup now.

It feels unnatural to drive east from Kansas. I never do it, but I suppose all that's set to change. Honestly, I almost couldn't figure it out this morning when I left from Topeka. Instead of the usual trip west on I-70 toward Colorado, or California, it was east. East that felt like backward.

You think a lot of things when you're alone in a car all day with tear-jerking sing-along songs, or Stephen Jay Fernandez reading Will in the World to you, or laboriously repeating Pimsleur's Beginning Russian, or pondering how it is that one must choose a North or South exit when one wants to go east or trying to see through one of those punishing prairie downpours in Illinois, or compulsively watching the rainbow that arched over the highway in Indiana instead of the road, or being told that (red semi-mohawk aside and lacking a seven-month pregnant belly) I look just like some woman at the truck stop's daughter-in-law.

Speaking of in-laws. I have them now. But that is a long stranger-than-fiction tale for another time, right Gerg?

I am defending in two hours and fifteen minutes.
It's actually not scary at all, I just want to be done so I don't feel guilty when I read books that aren't asked about on my comps. I finished the final edit of my thesis and I think it's shit. It just reads horribly to me, like a third grade book report.

So that's unfortunate. I see potential in it... after I goof off a little, project two is to carve an article out of the 102 pages o' dross...

And tomorrow I turn a very leisurely 27.

The thesis is in the hands of my readers. I am preparing for the comprehensive exams. I am defending and comp-ing on May 5. On May 6, I will have a good fucking birthday.

Before:


Now:

Chapter three of senor thesis was approved yesterday! That means one more chapter, an intro, some comps and oral defense and all will be well!

And, by the way,

I'm going to Brown's PhD program in the fall. If you are East Coasty, please reassure me about that East Coast thing. On my way to the mountains a couple weeks ago, I felt this awful stretching feeling while driving into the wide wide horizon. I didn't think I was a scenery type of girl, but the thought of leaving the West hurt. Really really hurt.
I know Providence will be great, but at the moment it's still just a little too far away to be real or exciting. Moving is much closer.

from the Pall Mall Gazette
May 16, 1870

The Saturday Review recalls the attention of the ladies who are agitating for absolute equality between the sexes to one of the results of such an equality which the “sacred sex,” as the writer calls them, cannot afford to ignore. He reminds them that they cannot at the same time enjoy the advantages of strength and the privileges of weakness, and that if they are to be admitted to engage in all the contests of life on equal terms with men, they must no longer expect to be treated with the chivalrous gentleness and consideration which they receive at present. Whatever effect a change of this kind might produce in the more refined classes of society, it is evident that among a certain class of the community any reduction in the amount of gentleness and considerations with which women are treated would be a serious matter. A change for the worse in this respect would, for instance, very unfavorably affect the position of such unfortunate persons as Mrs. Jane Shore, who has just undergone a hideous outrage at the hands of a group of ruffians at Clapton. In the present state of the relations between the sexes it is not to be supposed that give men would be permitted to carry off a woman by force in broad daylight without interference, and accordingly we find the “foreman of some oil works” calling out to them, “What are you going to do with that woman?” and only with difficulty reassured by being told that “she liked it.” Then again, although James Boad, another witness, stood by, a passive spectator of their successive acts of outrages, yet when he saw that “she was about to be murdered,” he ran for the police, and actually succeeded in obtaining the arrest of the ruffians before the successful accomplishment of their murderous designs. If women, however, descend from their present eminence and “enter the arena with men,” as it is called, we fear that they will no longer receive this exceptional consideration. But in the event of complete social equality being established between the sexes, there is no more reason to believe that an English crowd would interfere to protect a woman from being murdered by an assailant of superior strength than they would interfere to protect a man similarly circumstanced.



When I'm feeling depressed about the state of the world, reading old newspapers makes me feel better.
One chapter almost drafted. Three to go.

Berkeley required the following essay. I paraphrased a few sentences of it for UCLA. Hence the entire previous [friends only] post.

In an essay, discuss how your personal background informs your decision to pursue a graduate degree. Please include any educational, familial, cultural, economic, or social experiences, challenges, or opportunities relevant to your academic journey; how you might contribute to social or cultural diversity within your chosen field; and/or how you might serve educationally underrepresented segments of society with your degree.

( Diversity. )

SUE-ELLEN CASE JUST CALLED MY PHONE!!!!

they want me to interview at UCLA in like 9 days.



And hi everybody. I really mean to write. I do. London was.... cold. Interesting. Very interesting.

and happy Australia day.

I survived.
But I may not survive the deadlines of the next two weeks....
I'll be back some other month!

Looks like we may not be leaving today at all- roads are still closed, might open 3:30 or later-- just in time for the dark and ice. So no GRE for me tomorrow. Luckily, it seems they can reschedule for Thursday or Saturday.

Remind me to never ever get stranded without cell phones and internet. Makes life much more strandable... or perhaps less strandable....

I had too much luck driving back to Kansas on Tuesday-- they closed I-70 for the last 12 miles of Kansas-- and it's clear in Colorado they say. While we waiting in Colby for the blizzard to pass, they went ahead and closed another 30 miles of Kansas stranding us here. We came on over to the closest motel where I was told that every room in Colby (we have since learned that there are 500) was booked. She says she'll call the armory where they put emergency stranded folks, but someone else at the counter reminds her that the armory is being renovated. So she calls the police station and while waiting to get through I stand around looking pathetic while smart people with reservations come in and other dumb people come in and are stunned to hear that everything's booked. I asked a third employee (the manager?) if I could get on a waiting list or something when he asks me how many are in my party. What my name is... and then whether it'll be cash or credit. So, it's Colby tonight. Not getting to class or work tomorrow. And Tuesday at 9am, the GRE...?

Here I am, doing this damn college application business all over again. They would chuck their due dates right among my final paper deadlines wouldn't they? That's the extra challenge.

So it's Stanford and Berkeley,

Sue-Ellen Case asked me to look at UCLA
Robert Cohen asked me to look at Irvine

and
Rebecca Schneider told me she hopes I'll try Brown again. (She's so nice and encouraging in her emails that I almost forget they rejected me last time!)

and then what? Columbia?

Another GRE next week. Bah.
I think it's gonna be better this time than last time. Although I can't complain about Colorado. It's been good to me.

I could use the money. So I've just taken a phone questionnaire about a medical trial for some medication and alcohol. I'm not eligible for their study and... I'm really glad that I can't do it. Something really disturbs me about the idea of selling my passive body (or possibly my health) for experimentation. They would've had me take a medicine for three days and then give me the IV equivalent of three to four beers and then asked me questions... actually, it sounds kinda funny when I put it that way. Anyway, no $110 for me.
I'm still in the running for a smoking trial that involves a "muscle biopsy" and I really hope I'm not eligible, or that the pay is awesome for that one.

( wish you were there )

( me )

The best thing about living in the student barrio is the Frutas Y Verduras man. I'm ashamed to say that for nine months, four times a week, I glanced at him, smiled at the incongruity of his big blue van tootling around yuppified Boulder, emblazoned with a handpainted "FRUTAS Y VERDURAS" sagging in its painted banner above huge painted frutas y verduras. The man and his van were cool from a distance- after he parked on the street outside my apartment and rollled up his back door for business, he would be thronged with Mexican women, mostly from the apartment building across the street from mine. The one that's mostly big Spanish-speaking families spilling onto the outdoor hallways from their toosmall apartments. I, the non-Spanish-speaking pink-headed girl never considered trying to join the party.

In May, K's friend Ryan moved in for several days. He earned his keep by leading culinary adventures to corn-tortilla making and Brazilian fish stew. He saw the frutas y verduras man and came back with a load of way too many jalapenos, too many tomatoes... too much of everything. Because, as it turns out, too much is how much you get per dollar from the frutas y verduras man. From that time on, I too have looked eagerly for the F&V man, and his presence corresponded inversely to my interest. He disappeared. I managed to get to him a couple times, still feeling the shyness that kept from him before Ryan's visit, not able to ask in Spanish, not able to join in the friendly talk that the other women enjoy with the man and each other.

I finally resorted to writing on my white board every time I saw him, trying to map out a schedule to follow. The second time I went to buy from him by myself, he seemed stern; was he unhappy at my imposition into a routine patently not made for me? Wasn't that a little on the overly self-conscious side, considering my money must be as green as the next person's? The third time, he was friendly again. He speaks pretty good English, he's amused because I bring back the used plastic bags (all emblazoned with "Marco's Flour Tortillas" with red and green.) I don't aspire to achieve tab-status (as I've seen other people can buy and he merely writes the amounts in a steno notepad); I'm just pleased to be supporting him, and pleased that apples are three pounds per dollar, roma tomatos a pound and a half per dollar, jalapenos are as-many-as-he-can-fit-in-the-bag, limes 10 for a dollar, avocadoes a dollar apiece, mangoes two for a dollar, potatoes three pounds per dollar, peaches fifty cents...

I wore one flower in my hair, I bought an oimatsu waributa (that is, a shmancy tea thing) in Japantown, I read my paper and it was received well by Sue-Ellen Case who asked me to look into UCLA's program, I went to museums and drank coffee and K's roommate bought me a thrift store dress (!!) and walked and walked and walked and bought new boots and walked and in half an hour I'm lugging my toomuchshit up the hill onto a MUNI and then onto BART and then into the airport and I'm going back to Colorado where tomorrow morning I give one more lecture on Twelfth NIght and tomorrow night I facilitate the company talkback after the show and generally fret about how school's about to start and I miss my friends.

ATHE conference begins tomorrow. I present my paper, "Performers in the Audience: THe Boulton and Park Trial of 1871" on Saturday. I worked reception for six hours today to earn my $125 student enrollment fee for the conference. I found out that Sue Ellen Case is the respondent to my panel and... good god damn! That's serious. I heard bad gossip about Stanford, which makes me sad. I began the shmoozing process.