Man cannot live by bread alone but by every word which proceeds from the mouth of Katie. And by mouth, I of course mean hands. So read on, little ones, and fill yourself full on this month of September, starting from the bottom of the page.
September 9th, 2003: I Love My (Future) Roommates: Part I
I am in desperate need of a large dog. This might have something to do with my recent break-up or the fact that I’m the only one of my friends not getting married and having children, but in any case, I need a dog. A large one. In response to my begging and because of her allergies, one of my future roommates, Esther, suggested that I call a friend of hers who's giving away a lop rabbit. Esther seems to think that bunnies are better-suited to apartment living than large dogs are. That Esther—she's a smart one.
She’s also an amusing one, mostly because she’s so adorably cute and Korean and most-innocent-thing-in-the-entire-world-looking. Let me show you:
E-mail from Esther: Did that bunny woman ever get back to you?
Oh yeah! I bought a hamster! :) :) :) She's very very VERY cute! I think you'll love her! She's white with red eyes and I think she might be pregnant. :( She's not quite tame yet, so I'll have to get started with that. Her name is Boo.
Reply from Katie: I still haven't called the bunny lady. I have her number written down somewhere, but it's packed away in all of my junk.
Are you getting a chinchilla still? Will it eat the pregnant
hamster? Or better yet, the hamster's babies? We could make a documentary of this.
Scold from Esther: Katie! You surprise me! THERE WILL BE NO BUNNY EATING OF PREGNANT HAMSTERS OR HAMSTER BABIES! :O I really hope she's not pregnant, though. I don't know what I'm going to do with those babies. I feel kind of like the boyfriend in some teenage relationship who finds out that his girlfriend is pregnant and they don't know what to do.
Hmm. Maybe it’s only funny to me because I know Esther and know that she would never impregnate a teenage girl. And NOT just because she doesn’t have a penis.
September 8th, 2003: Let’s play a guessing game entitled “Why is Katie the Loneliest, Saddest, Broken-Heartedest Girl in the Entire World?” Ready? Here we go!
Actually, you’ll never guess, and I’ve far too much to say to be sharing my spotlight with you, spotlight-stealer. I read somewhere the other day, you know, that “brevity is the soul of wit”. But as I’m sure you’ve already realised, I’ve never fancied myself witty.
So, firstly, I’m having to come to terms with the fact that nothing is forever except unemployment, military unrest, and cockroaches.
See, I decided recently that I can’t pretend any longer that one of my best friends from high school and I are still friends. I thought that we could overcome his moving to Chicago and his only coming home a few times a year and my pride and my feelings of abandonment and my not wanting to drop everything the moment that it’s convenient for him to visit me, but . . . we’re simply not aware of the happenings of each other’s lives, and that seems like a pretty basic requirement for friendship to me. I guess that people really can change too much . . . or not care enough.
I made a bet with a doubting high school teacher three years ago that my friend and I would still be talking six months after graduation. If I saw that teacher today, he would technically owe me a Coke. But three years and six months aren’t really all that different when it comes down to it.
Although—and this is going to sound really random unless you know what this friend’s dad does for a living—I saw his dad being interviewed on the news last night, and I got all sentimental, remembering dinners with his family summers ago. I really want to be friends with him still, but I’m not sure that friendship should include constantly hurting each other’s feelings and trying to outdo each other.
Maybe I’m wrong. And maybe I should listen when people tell me that it’s normal not to talk to the people you consider to be your best friends for months or years when you get to be a busy adult-type person. But it seems to me that life’s too short to waste time with casual relationships. Or maybe I’m wrong about that, too. Maybe life’s too short to worry about petty things like how often you get a hug from the boy you once would have bled for.
Secondly, the man who swore that he loved me and perpetually feared that I would leave him for another actually up and left me last Tuesday. It was a classic love story: man meets girl, man convinces girl that she makes him feel alive, girl gives man nine months of her life and 3,000 miles on her car, man leaves girl to return to wife and kids.
Yep, you read that right. And I only regret about nine minutes of those nine months. And anyway, didn’t Liz Phair get it right when she wrote, “Isn't this the best part of breakin' up: finding someone else you can't get enough of?”
Thirdly, I’ve finally moved out of my large and love, totally uninsulated beast of a house into a shack at the edge of town where I sleep with rats and feast on Jello-o scum. No, it’s really not like that at all, and in many ways, the new flat is better than the old house, but my living situation certainly has shifted in the last week.
See, the lease on the house was up on August 30th, but my new townhouse won’t be ready until the 23rd of this month, so I’m currently in intermediate housing in the form of my friend Michelle’s new flat. And by “new”, I mean “super-old-but-new-to-her”. Michelle was one of my roommates in the old house but decided that she would feel out of place living with my other friends and me in the new townhouse this year, so she’s renting a one-bedroom flat. And because it’s only meant for a single person, that leaves me sleeping in her living room on a futon. That is, when we can even sleep at her flat at all. The girl didn’t bother to have her gas turned on until we actually moved in, so I spent the first four nights of the month at my dad and stepmom’s house. That wasn’t actually a whole lot different than my situation at Michelle’s, though, because my dad moved in to my stepmom’s house when they got married last year, so I don’t exactly have my own room there, either. However, Dad and Lois feed me and offer me sappy movies like Sweet Home Alabama and My Big Fat Greek Wedding that make me want to permanently root myself in my hometown, so I don’t mind weeping myself to sleep on their pull-out couch bed.
What I do mind is Michelle’s mere two television stations, lack of telephone service, and refusal to schedule Internet installation. I mind being awakened at 3 AM by what sounds like shattering glass every time that her kitchen window slams itself shut just to frighten me. I mind that her showerhead is halfway down the bathtub wall, making it nearly impossible for someone of my Amazon stature—that’s a joke—to lean back far enough to wash her hair. I mind that the refrigerator has no light and that a gigantic arachnid insists that his home be our entire front porch and that dead birds randomly position themselves at our doorstep.
But I say all of this with a smile, because I really love living with Michelle, even if it means that I can’t read Pitchfork Media every day and have to throw the dead birds over to our neighbour’s cat every morning. People actually mow their grass here! Do you know how long it’s been since I’ve had a yard in front of my house? Three whole years. Three whole years of living in dorms and houses that disguise their lack of soil with front porch plants. And we cook here! We no longer read microwave directions off of the side of freezer-burned boxes. It’s funny—when my roommates last year suggested that Michelle become a part of our house, I had only met her a few times, and we spent more than half of last year not really ever talking to one another. She had her friends and I had mine, and I didn’t think that we had a thing in common. But something changed this winter when we went thrifting together. We learned that we share the same sense of humour and that we’re both very forward people who always ensure that we get what we want.
We also learned that we’re secretly little, old ladies who like to do little, old lady-type things. Like playing bingo, for example. See, the neighbourhood that we moved in to really values the sense of community among its inhabitants, so it schedules all of these really adorable small-town-like activities. Like an ox roast, for example. That’s right; ox. It just so happens that this ox roast was held in the park that’s directly across the street from Michelle’s flat, and we heard someone calling bingo numbers over a loudspeaker on Saturday night, so we swung by the bank and took out $60, figuring that bingo cards would be outrageously overpriced in her outrageously overpriced neighbourhood. Never having played bingo in our lives, we were giddy to find that each card was a mere 50 cents, so we splurged and each bought two.
We had unbelievable amounts of fun. No, I am so serious. We loved watching all of the “professional” bingo players with their card-stampers and their furrowed brows, hunched over the tables to keep their concentration in tight boxes. We especially liked it when the reallittle, old ladies beat each other with their purses, angry that one of them had stolen the other’s stamper or dentures or somesuch. And we even won a couple of times, raking in a whopping $24.75 before the night was over. That’s right; we laughed more than we had all year and actually made money in the process.
So despite the break-ups and the moving and all, I guess that in reality, I’m really not all that sad and lonely. But it made a nice opener to this story, and well, as Liz Phair also wrote, “I am extraordinary; I am just your ordinary, average, every day, sane psycho supergoddess.”