And speak my point of view, but it's not sane, it's not saa-aaane

Layne is getting interviewed for a job in Anoka, so I am holed up in a Caribou with his laptop for a while. Pretty sure I'm witnessing an internet first date like fifteen feet away from me, too. Not that I'm totally snoopy or anything!

They're pretty boring. Mostly I'm trying to drink my coffee slowly enough that I don't have to pee anytime soon, and wondering what Layne's pants looked like when he got to the restaurant. I put a slightly tacky but desperately needed hem on them with safety pins in the truck, when he was sitting down, because no way was I going to kneel in a parking lot to do it. There are just some things. I stayed up until two in the morning to bake a pie and repaired his long broken watch band for him, so I feel pretty justified in this. Feeling pretty smug about the watch band, actually! It's a metal link band and one of the pins had come out. I'd brought my tool kit along to do some stuff at his house, and for whatever reason I've had a spool of metal wire in there for ages and I've never used it for anything before. Turned out it was the perfect size to make a new pin. So basically I've had wire in that bag for five years just so I could someday fix my someday boyfriend's watch, and I didn't even know it. How cool am I!

I also rearranged his living room to accommodate a (future) dining area, cleaned his kitchen, dragged a junked couch out to his porch ALL BY MYSELF, put down a rug and a shelf in his back room, cleared junk off the porch and into the garage, and re-purposed the spare bedroom into an organized storage area. And put a light fixture back together that's been down for ages. And accidentally fixed his toilet. It all took me about twelve hours. It's ok to be impressed. I am, in fact, incredible.

Plus I pooped in the scary basement toilet!

Maaaaan. This isn't going to work. I'm going to have to pee. I'm fighting it, though.

Internet date people report: still super boring!

So after half a year of unemployment, I finally landed myself a job: Kwik Trip. I'm not gonna lie. I am not excited about this at all. But the pay is pretty good, the location is really hard to argue with in terms of convenience, and...I, uh...I'm trying to think of a third good thing, but I guess those two are all I've got. They're good good things, at least. I start on Thursday.

I give up. I have to pee.

And all I can do is just pour some tea for two

Trader Joe's had its big grand opening today, and I knew Sarah wanted to go to that, so before I went to bed last night I sent her a text asking when she wanted to go. I woke up this morning and was disappointed to see she hadn't texted me back. Then...a nagging suspicion. Did...did she call me? Couldn't have! I would remember that! So I checked my call history, and sure enough, she did. And right then, she texted me to ask if I was awake. I replied with "did I talk to you on the phone last night?" and she sent back "ugh" as a response. So I called her.

Turns out I somehow, nearly entirely asleep, managed to answer my phone, coherently and soundly bitch her out for wanting to go to Trader Joe's in the morning, suggest she just go hang out with some other friend, yell at her for asking me questions, and hang up.

Hello, sleeping beauty!

I like watching the puddles gather ra-a-ain

Gosh.

I am not very good at this, am I.

It's December now, and my chances for getting an entry in AT ALL this year are shrinking daily, and I can't even think of what to write. I mean, you know, I did some things, I guess, and went to some places, and moved home again, and quit the hell out of Target. I don't know how to sum up a whole missed year and a half and I can't even think of anything in particular except poop jokes and the trials and tribulations of helping people move, so I think I won't try much. I guess I sprained my ankle really hardcore the summer before last and I still don't have quite a perfect range of movement back. I made a bacon-wrapped turkey. I visited Jayme and Alex in Chicago in August and fell in love with a hot dog place. Which, for me, is in no way unreasonable. It's a good hot dog place. Oh geez, wait...and they got married last year. It was a neat wedding. I helped a little. I don't think I wrote about it. Where the hell did Laura Ingalls Wilder find all that free time and attention span? I miss everything.

Except hot dogs! I always remember hot dogs.

So, now I'm looking forward to spending my twenty-fifth birthday unemployed and living in my parents' basement, which, I am fairly certain, does not even remotely fit into the astronaut plans I had as a child. This makes it all the more inexplicable that I've also started dating a guy. His name is Layne. I like him quite a bit. He also has to pay for everything and drive me everywhere because I am a total catch who lives at home and is unemployed and doesn't have a license. I'm pretty sure he's getting a raw deal on this one, but maybe he won't catch on to that too quickly? Hopefully? I'd give my eyeteeth for a job at this point, which would be pretty counterproductive because then I'd have a crazy looking smile and that'd hurt my customer service abilities. I'd have to work in a lumber yard or something and never smile at anybody, ever. I don't really see myself as being cut out for the lumber yard life. Long story short, I would like a job, but would also like to keep my teeth. I don't even know what I'm talking about anymore.

All I can say is that my life is pretty plain

I've had the ingredients in the fridge for a few days now, and when I walked home from work this morning I sat down at my computer, stood up again, and said to myself, yes. Today is the day.

Today I will make the dumplings.

I've never made them before, or anything even similar, but I found an easy recipe online. The wrapper is flour and water. The filling is ground pork and napa cabbage. There is some frying, followed by some simmering. There were pictures. There were positive reviews. I could do this.

The important thing, of course, is to learn from your mistakes. I think I know exactly what went wrong, and how to fix it. My problems mostly began when I said "today I will make the dumplings" and the obvious solution, next time, is not to make the dumplings. It all seems so obvious, in hindsight.

But I really did start out ok. I mean, it's hard to chop up cabbage wrong. The dough mixed up fine. I had some technical difficulties estimating the right size for wrapper-to-filling ratio, which resulted in some dumplings the size and shape of a small stegosaurus (I decided to term them "American size," which is a patriotic way of saying they were the Hummers of the smart-car dumpling world) but no matter, dinosaurs are cool, right? I got down my heavy skillet, put a worrying amount of oil in it, and turned on the gas to what I assumed was sort of medium-highish. In go the dumplings. After a minute or two I hear a mysterious shrieking noise, which, it turns out, was some kind of dumpling distress signal. Possibly a battle cry. I watched my little stegosaurus flock with slowly dawning alarm.

It was the oil. It's always the oil.

Bees do not worry me. I can patiently and firmly shove large spikes through small piercings. I sometimes use superglue instead of bandaids. But let hot oil give one small sputtering noise and I am suddenly tap dancing five feet away from where I was standing to begin with. My dream kitchen includes a low, reinforced brick wall in the middle of everything so I'll have something to leap over and duck behind when it all hits the fan.

So it's as I'm tap dancing back and forth in the kitchen, waving a large spoon and making excited yipping noises, that I realize my morbidly obese dumplings are burning over high heat in far more oil than I should ever have introduced to water. I venture a little soft-shoe that takes me close enough to the stove to turn off the burner and slap a cover on the pan and then find myself hiding behind the opened refrigerator door as it spits and hisses on to the lid. Eventually the heat subsided, and the crackling stopped, leaving only the fading whistles of the rubbery, undercooked disasters. I gingerly turned one over and prodded it with a fork, noting the thick layer of char on the bottom. I considered ways to salvage the situation.

Then I carefully scraped the evidence into the trash, cleaned all guilty utensils, wiped off incriminating surfaces, turned on the fan to disperse the lingering aroma of failure, and casually scuttled into my room to sulk and pretend like nothing stupid happened today.

And now here I am writing about it so I'm not sure what the point of that was, exactly. I would make a terrible spy. Like a mime with Tourette's, or a ninja with irritable bowel syndrome, I blow my own cover pretty routinely.

Without the light it gives

ALL MOVED.

Today was day two of the moving effort and it was looooong! and I knelt on a thumbtack and it GOT STUCK IN MY KNEE and made an audible popping noise as I pulled it out and that was GROSS and when I instinctively fell back and went into Nancy Kerrigan Mode I almost sat on ANOTHER TACK and that would have been awful and it took forever to get the truck loaded and I had to ride home with my crow in my lap the whole way because there was nowhere safe to put him the back and now I'm tired.

And I am also, once again, an official occupant of this house. I miss uptown already. At least the worst of the move is over, and now I can focus on the next phase: actually having a room. This could happen quickly or it could take a very long time, depending. I tell you what, though, a few more nights on this couch and I'm going to clean out the office with a flamethrower if I have to.

It's like we've been playing a really long, drawn out game of musical chairs in this house, the way the rooms have passed hands. Mom and Dad started out in the room that later became Katie's and mine shortly before it became solely mine because after Katie and I moved out of the room that was to become and remain Mom and Dad's, Ben was moved out of the room next to the room that would once be mine into a room built for him downstairs while Katie took that room, which was later to become Ben's room again after I moved out and Katie claimed mine and Dad claimed Ben's old built-for-him room as an office and junk room, which I am now trying to elbow my way into. Follow? So now after sharing an apartment with Mara and Erik and then moving on to sharing an apartment with Jayme and then just myself and then Katie very briefly and then back to myself and then finally landing my own apartment and then giving it up so I can, in the future, smell awful in Israel for a thousand kilometers, I am now trying to evict a bunch of stuff so I can take its room. I don't care how the stuff feels about that. This is a dog eat dog world, people.

But here on Earth there'd be no life

This may be my last update ever from the Tea Garden. I'm sad about that. I had one stamp card all filled, which I used today, and one two thirds of the way done that I gave to Ben. I'm still managing to remain blissfully ignorant about the fact that I move on Monday. I mean I can say to myself, "you are moving on Monday!" and my response will be to nod and smile and completely and utterly deny the existence of any Monday ever in the history of ever. Monday? Ah ha ha, what is this Monday of which you speak? You people are so cute, you and your made up days.

Fortunately Mara is coming up tonight and knows perfectly well when Monday is and will beat me into packing if necessary. It may be necessary. I hate the idea of leaving Minneapolis so hard. It's not really like I get into the nightlife, or even the daylife for that matter, but I did manage to sort of semi-establish myself. I mean, I got an apartment in Uptown, I learned the bus system pretty well, I can go grocery shopping at one in the morning like it's normal and I can walk anywhere I want to. I think that's really the kicker, the fact that I can walk so much. Between the buses and the fact that I consider less than an hour to be within "walking distance" I can go anywhere, and that's not something I can really do so much in Rochester. Rochester is a driving town, and I am not a driver. So I kind of lose my last vestige of independence that way. I'm not really looking forward to the old "mom can I have a ride" routine again.

Oh well.

Anyway, Savers started doing this thing last year where every store gets two big foam skulls, which are decorated and auctioned off. Last year I got the skulls, and Mara and I decorated the daylights out of them, and then I discovered they were too hard to take on the bus and I ended up never giving them back. They're still in my kitchen. This year Ben and I got the skulls and we decided we'd better hurry up and do the stupid things before I leave, so he came over last night and we sat down with a pile of art supplies and every intention of actually getting work done.

You know me and intentions.

So we did get one done, his, which had a clockwork orange theme. Then he left it at my apartment because I was going to have to take mine over to the store at some point anyway, and this morning, I stepped on it. WHICH WAS AWESOME. SO GLAD I STEPPED ON IT. OH BOY. The damage isn't really bad, but it is kind of right in the front, and it's going to look even stupider if I never get my skull done and all we have to show for, like, twenty five hours of collaboration is one badly painted, slightly stepped-on skull.

It was refreshing having him crash at my place, if only because it meant that I got to be the one with a decent night's sleep and he got to try his luck with an uncomfortable couch, for a change. I also learned an exciting new way to wake people up using a laser pointer and Bambino. This may seem mean-spirited but I think it's a lot better than the other method I thought of, which was just a lot of hitting and yelling and really wasn't very innovative at all. Against all odds, I probably am going to miss Ben. Oh well, it's just half a year before I have three loooooong months in Israel to get so sick of him I'll be ready to go home by the end of the trip just for the sake of being on a different continent. That'll be fun.

The sun is not a place where we could live

Around six thirty, Saturday night, the phone rang. It was Ben.

"Hi, get over here, we're going to the Ren Fest in the morning and you should crash here so we can leave faster. Bring a costume. Pirate theme."

"I...What?"

I'd known his family was planning on going to the ren fest but not when, or even that I was invited to come along. Ben had only just found out, minutes before calling me, that Sunday was going to be the day. I considered declining, then dug around for something sort of piratey and packed a bag and left. Why not.

The day started out cold and rainy but a clear sky had broken by the time we arrived and the sun shone brightly as we passed the main gates. We met up with the rest of our party inside--three of Ben's mom's friends and their assorted children, bringing our group total to about 15 or 500 depending on how fast the kids were moving during the head count--and then Ben and I took off on our own. His mom suggested we all try to meet up at the jousting area around 4 o'clock and we both smiled and nodded before disappearing into the crowd, knowing full well neither of us had a watch and I had forgotten to bring my phone along.

Ben's costume was a pretty easy affair, with billowy gold and white striped pants, sandals, and a bandanna, and nothing but two gold necklaces for a shirt. Mine, as it turned out, was a little more challenging: the dress was fine and the boots stayed pretty comfortable for a lot longer than I expected, but the bodice was pure evil. I'd picked it up at Savers for a song last year, recognizing by the quality that it had probably come from the ren fest originally, but had never really had occasion to use it before now. Because it's strapless, it's designed longer than the sleeved bodice, and because it's long the boning dug into the tops of my hips all day. It's also a size too big, so while it laced snugly it wasn't as tight as it should have been and had just enough leeway to gradually slide down, biting painfully into my hipbones and making me stop in the middle of the crowd and hike the stupid thing up periodically. And it was too tight to let me eat a whole turkey leg.

The bodice wasn't that huge of a deal, though, and was nothing I couldn't handle. As it happened, the day's biggest irritation was Ben himself. He'd been talking excitedly about the renaissance festival for some time in advance, and now that he was here, he was going to let nothing stand between him and fun...except, of course, for everything. Costumes weren't costumey enough. Mead didn't come in big enough cups (although I agree with that one) and hats were too expensive. The jousting wasn't fun to watch because it wasn't potentially lethal. The weapon stores wouldn't let him play with the spears and nobody wanted to swordfight him.

At one point I noted to him that he'd spent most of the time grumping that he could outbellydance the bellydancers, breathe fire more impressively than the fire-breathers, be a more obnoxious pickle-seller than the pickle-sellers, make better walking sticks than the walking stick vendor, and do a better Irish dance than the troupe of little girls who were dancing on the Irish pavilion.

"I did not," he said.

"Yes you did. I was right here. I heard you."

"No, I mean, I never said I could dance better than the little Irish girls. I said they sucked."

Oh. OK.

I suggested that maybe some year he could rent out a vacant lot somewhere, build a few themed storefronts and stages, and hold the Benaissance Festival, celebrating and starring Ben, and see how many people want to come to the Ben Fest to watch a shirtless hairy white guy bellydance vs going to the Ren Fest to watch a group of attractive women in small, spangly outfits to the same thing, only with slightly inferior skill. He didn't seem amused.

He also spent most of the day walking erratically, swaying and flailing and stumbling, which he called a "swagger" but really only made him look helplessly drunk. It's embarrassing enough to be out in public with real drunk people, much less some kid pretending to be embarrassingly drunk, but every time I told him to quit walking stupid he got all huffy and insisted he needed to "stay in character."

Privately I felt that "staying in character" was another one of those activities best relegated to the Benaissance Festival, but I kept that one to myself. It didn't seem quite worth it.

It actually wasn't too bad of a day, all in all. Even when he's complaining, Ben is endlessly entertaining, if only because he seems to have subconsciously taken ADHD and made it not just a diagnosis, but a life philosophy. Trains of thought rumble past on restless tracks, and no sooner has one derailed than another one is crashing past, and his mouth is running almost constantly about life the universe and everything according to wanna go ride bikes. I'm a passive enough person that so long as there's somebody leading, I'll follow along for a while, especially when I get to do so with such complete morbid curiosity. You might be able to figure out where he's going, but what he's going to do when he gets there is anybody's guess. Will he do a cartwheel? Will he pee behind a tree? Maybe stand on one foot and hum? Who knows!