Painting my world colorful

Somebody turned the color off here.  This has been my view every day for the last week: 

One day the great outdoors was full of reds, yellows, greens, and blues, and the next, the sky became grey and snow covered everything.  And because our apartment complex doesn't believe in color, I look out our window and feel like I'm in the middle of the film Pleasantville.  Except neither Don Knotts nor Paul Walker are here, so it's not nearly as interesting.  There are no orange pumpkins, no green and red Christmas wreaths, no rainbow Christmas lights, no burgundy flowers, no colorfully patterned curtains in windows to see.  This is largely because the apartment complex is run by someone who is clearly in desperate need of a Hallmark Christmas Movie grinch makeover.  Not even colorful curtains are allowed to show on the outside, because every unit must present a uniform (read: drab and boring) appearance.  Why?  Well, clearly because the owner is miserable and lacks imagination or creativity or joy and wants to make everyone else miserable and uniform, too.  That's all I can think of.  I do see a red bike across the way in front of someone's door right now, but I also see a note from management on their door... probably telling them no red bikes allowed. Now, if the bike were black and white, it might be a different story....

I tried to rectify the lack of color yesterday by hanging Christmas lights around our apartment.  All my life I've been a firm believer that Christmas decorations should not be hung until after Thanksgiving, and I have always cringed at the early onset of Christmas carols on the radio and decorations everywhere the day after Halloween, believing that the decorations lose their special feeling if the period is extended too long.  But nope, not this year.  This year, I want color, color, color.  Starting now.  Of course, our apartment complex doesn't just believe in uniformity on the outside where people (WHO?  What people?  The apartments don't even face a public street...) might see color; they also restrict decorating on the inside.  No screws, no nails, no tape, no no-damage Command hooks or adhesives.... The rules are stricter than a dorm room.  Never being one to follow stupid rules made for no reason but a power trip, when my husband said, "We can't hang Christmas lights this year," I immediately replied, "Of course we can.  We use tape."

"But they don't allow tape."

"How are they going to know?  We use tape every year.  It doesn't leave any marks."

My mistake was in thinking Mr. Grinch hadn't prepared for such rule-defying Christmas-light-loving rebels as I.  The walls don't take tape. They're painted with some sort of Christmas-hating, tape-resistant, adhesive-repelling layer.

So there are no Christmas lights up (though I have not given up.  Next not-allowed step: Command hooks).

There is, however, a colorful waterfall calendar in my office... hung with... a nail. My husband put the nail in.  I'm teaching him to disobey Grinch rules.  If Reese Witherspoon could make the people of Pleasantville turn their world colorful, so can I.

Fortunately, my cat is colorful.  He might appear to be white and grey to most people, but I see him in fiery reds, vibrant greens, and playful yellows and oranges.  With polka dots and rainbows and zebra stripes.  And in tie-dye.  So that helps.

Unfortunately, dance classes here are also in black and white.  Aside from the monochrome black everyone wears, there is no passion, no intensity, no energetic buzz going through class.  Students barely (if ever) break a sweat.  There are no bright red leotards designed to stand out, no one pushing beyond their ability, burning to be noticed, no heightened emotions as dancers and music become one.  The music is heavy and plodding and rarely fitted to the dance.  The students seem alternately bored and uninterested (or in my case, intensely frustrated).  What used to be the most colorful part of my day has become the most painfully grey part.

So I give myself dance class at home, making as much color on my own as I can.  But color is better when there are other people involved to help paint the world.  Other people can think up entirely new colors, painting their own patterns and hues across a grey field, making it so much richer than one person's palette.  I went to a class in Detroit a couple weeks ago, and the room was full of every color in the rainbow.  I'm trying to start my own adult ballet class here, as I hear from others in the city who feel the same way.  But while I try to get that sorted out, I still need my daily dose of fiery red.

So what did I do?

I signed up for a boxing class.  Boxing is colorful.  If anyone in Pleasantville went to a boxing gym, I'm pretty sure their first punch would leave a streak of color.

So since I can't paint my world with Christmas lights or pointe shoes or dancing heels (yet), this Saturday I will paint my world with boxing gloves.  Because you can't keep a fighter down—or in black and white.

My first love letter to the MTA

I miss the MTA.

Nope, I don't need a psychological examination.  I'm not crazy.  I'm not being paid by the MTA with the money that should be going to improving the service I ranted about for a decade just like every other New Yorker.  I just really, really, passionately miss it.

"Ohmygosh I hate the MTA!!!!!" used to be one of my most-repeated phrases.  I'd stand on the platform for 20 minutes waiting for that N train out of Astoria.  Or the doors on a connecting express train across the platform would close JUST as the local train's doors opened at a station, ensuring we all had to wait 7-10 minutes for the next express.  Or my LIRR train would suddenly flash on the screen as being 18 minutes late 2 minutes before it was supposed to arrive, by which point I couldn't make it to work via the subway on time....  Or my subway train would just be trapped underground for 40 minutes due to signal problems before getting decommissioned and backing into a station, and then I'd realize that my phone was about to die and I had no idea how to get home, so I'd stop in a Sephora and paint my nails different shades of fluorescent pink with chunky glitter to make me feel better about being trapped in Manhattan in a snowstorm at night....

But then I moved to Grand Rapids, and the MTA now tops my list of things I miss, below dance classes, but above Sephoras on every corner and Dunkin' Donuts (seriously, western Michigan, what is up with the lack of Dunkin' Donuts here?  The slogan is "America runs on Dunkin'," not "America minus western Michigan runs on Dunkin'."  I had a ten-minute conversation at a bar with three people who live in this city trying to find someplace comparable, and the consensus is there isn't one.  I do not understand this.  But I digress).  And tied with sidewalks.  I miss sidewalks.  Never take sidewalks for granted if you're so lucky to have them.  Maybe Grand Rapids doesn't run on Dunkin' because then they'd be walking someplace with their coffee and doughnut and the sidewalk would just abruptly end and the coffee drinker would be like, "But I still have coffee left," and the sidewalk would be all, "Nope, I don't care, turn around and get back in your car and let the coffee spill on you while you drive because this is as far as I have randomly decided to go. Or walk by the side of this major road and get killed. Your choice."

You see, here, there's a bus system.  With an app.  The app, in theory, tells you where your bus is.  I live about ten minutes from a bus, which is scheduled to run about every 30 minutes.  In actuality, it's a complete guessing game when the bus will come.  Sometimes it's ten minutes early, sometimes it's ten minutes late, and I've learned not to be surprised if I'm waiting at a bus station and watching on the app as the bus pulls up and leaves but... there's no bus in front of me.  Or maybe it's a ghost bus.  Maybe the bus wanted a Dunkin' Donuts but there wasn't one so the bus wasted away due to lack of nourishment and now is a ghost that riders can't see....

Making things worse is that to get most places, unless it's on the same bus line (and there are 28 bus lines), I have to go downtown to go back out.  In theory, this would make going to a dance studio five miles north of me take 52 minutes.  In actuality, 100% of the time, I miss the transfer because the first bus gets in ten minutes late and the second bus leaves two minutes early.  So I have to get on the first leg one bus earlier than I should be.  Plus I have to leave 30 minutes before the bus is scheduled to leave in case it shows up way early.  So it takes me 2 1/2 hours to go five miles.  This beats (in a bad way) anything the MTA has ever done.

Then there was the time the bus driver held us hostage.  Two men who had annoyed her when they'd gotten on because they didn't speak English pulled the wire signaling a stop.  She didn't stop.  I pulled the wire for the next stop.  She didn't stop.  She passed a third stop, and the two men looked at me helplessly, and I wondered what Speed would look like set in Grand Rapids with a homeless man, two men who didn't speak English, a mother ignoring her baby as she hit on the pierced and mohawked stinky man across from her, a woman staring at me while she ate her candy bar slowly, and me.  Deciding I didn't care to see that movie, I ran to the front of the bus and looked at the driver like, "What the heck?"  

"Oh, is this where you wanted to get off?" she asked in a tone that could have been anywhere between space cadet and sarcasm.

"Well, actually two stops ago," I said.

She pulled to a stop on a street that, according to my app, wasn't even on the bus line.

"Have a nice day!" she said sweetly as the three of us got off and tried to figure out where we were and how to make it back to our intended stops.

Perhaps most surprisingly, I miss the MTA because of the... smell.  Yep, that's right.  If I'm on a stinky car on the subway, I can just go to another one.  Even if I'm on a stinky bus, there's always another bus right behind.  But not here.  Nope, trapped for 40 minutes with scents for which I can't even imagine the source assaulting my poor nose. 

So, whatever city you live in, if you're lucky enough to have public transportation that can get you where you need to go faster than a flight halfway across the country, then the next time you order a pumpkin spice coffee with a pumpkin spice doughnut and walk on the sidewalk to a metro stop to go on your way, savor it all.  It's not as bad as you think.

A night of comedy

"We probably shouldn't sit in the front row," I said to my husband as we entered the makeshift theatre and surveyed the remaining available seats.  "Because then I have to be aware of not having inappropriate reactions on my face and laughing when it's really bad."

"Yeah, you have a really bad poker face at the theatre," he agreed.

We were headed into a night of Halloween shorts put on by a community theatre company in a small beach town that loves Halloween and fall.  The local shops all had scarecrows dressed up for a competition, goblins and ghouls and spectres roamed the streets, stores offered free cider, there was music and dancing and pie-tasting and pumpkin-painting and outdoor games and a balladeer singing ghost stories... and there was a night of horror shorts put on by the community theatre.

"Adults only!" the signs around town read.  "No children allowed."

"Ooo, you know it's going to be scary when they say adults only," my horror-film-loving husband said enthusiastically, excited for a night of spooks and scares.  My own attitude towards horror films can probably best be summarized by the facts that when I watched Puff The Magic Dragon as a little kid I always hid behind the couch whenever the monster came out, I still leave the room every time the T-Rex is about to eat the lawyer in Jurassic Park, and I look up summaries to scary movies before I watch them so I know what's going to happen ahead of time.

But I do love Wait Until Dark and Twilight Zone, and the flyers promised a night of mind-puzzling terror like those... plus I love Halloween and theatre... so that's how we wound up looking for seats not in the front row for the night's production, reminiscing about the last time we sat in the front row at a play and I was doubled over laughing for all the wrong reasons while my husband dug his nails into my leg to try to get me to stop, and then I wound up stage managing a play with one of the actors from that show and wondered the whole run if he recognized me....

Of course there weren't two seats together anywhere but in the front row, so we took the two on the end in the corner, which at least were hidden in darkness.

"It's okay, I'm sure it won't be that bad. And you can keep yourself composed, right?" my husband said.

"Yeah, Uh-huh."

No. Nunh-unh.

I tried.  I really did.  When the show started and one of the two actors on stage was completely unintelligible, I just leaned forward and tried to adjust to her poor pronunciation and lack of projection.  When an FBI agent came out on stage wearing sunglasses as a completely non-humorous costume choice, I just let it fly.  When a character said, "first door on the left" to the FBI agent and, due to the set design, the FBI agent promptly took the first door on the right, I cocked my head and turned to look at my husband, but he kept a straight face and didn't acknowledge me, so I tried to settle in.  Then, to interrogate a prisoner in the interrogation room, the FBI agent sat down next to the prisoner.  Side by side.  Facing straight out to the audience.

And that's when the first snicker came out.  My husband punched me lightly.  I leaned over.  "But they're sitting next to each other," I whispered.  "In an interrogation.  And the prisoner's not handcuffed.  And he's touching her."  Just then the prisoner, who was also the director (because the director had cast himself in the lead role in every single one of the shorts, a fact that grated on me more and more as the night went on) grabbed the arm of the FBI interrogator as he talked (out to the audience of course rather than looking at her, because obviously if he looked at another actor rather than at the audience, the audience would never hear or see him, right?).  A silent giggle escaped my husband.  "So they've never seen Law & Order," he whispered back.

I pulled myself together and continued to watch the interrogation scene, wondering if the director had ever watched a play in his life, trying to will him to make eye contact with his scene partner (not that that would be an easy feat since he'd put her in sunglasses for the entire scene).  But then as the prisoner talked, we morphed into a flashback of the crime that had landed him in jail in the first place.  A crime that involved guns.  And gunshots.  And therefore sound cues.  Sort of.

The two actors with guns (one of whom was the director) aimed them at their victims.  Nothing happened.  Then the victims dropped as if they'd been shot.  I thought it was curious they hadn't made any gun shot sounds, and the director had exhibited very poor judgement in ad-libbing "these things aren't working" after the victims had acted out being shot, but whatever, the victims were shot, moving on... it was in the past....

Or not.

Suddenly, with the scene progressed beyond the shootings, five gunshots rang out.

I clapped my hand to my mouth.  My husband started shaking with laughter next to me, neither of us remotely successful at containing it.  Then a crew guy slithered out on stage to get something that had accidentally gotten out there, doing the human appearance equivalent of the "slow unwrapping" (you know, when an audience member takes five minutes to very slowly unwrap a hard candy during a play, thinking it's less obtrusive because it's slow but actually calling even more attention to themselves and dragging it out).

When the stage lights suddenly went out during the second short, I had a moment of pity—not so much for the director, who by this point had clearly established himself as stunningly arrogant in casting himself as the lead in everything when he was easily the worst actor on stage and hadn't bothered to put any effort into learning anything about direction, but for everyone else up there who was doing their best.

I've stage managed shows where the lights went out, and unless you have an actual power-out, there are always options if you're prepared and can think calmly.  I leaned over to my husband in the darkness as the tech guy scrambled around. "I feel like we should help them."

"He should turn the house lights up," my husband said.  "Unless it's a power-out."

"It's not a power-out.  You can see lights on in the other room.  It's a circuit breaker."

We sat on the edge of our seats, thinking that with all the Broadway, Off-Broadway, and Off-Off Broadway shows between us, we could probably help the guy running around trying to get light on these poor actors.

"But wait," I whispered, grabbing my husband's arm, taking a moment to actually take in the show as the actors continued in the darkness.  "It's so much better this way.... I mean, it's not worse."

"...You're not wrong," he agreed.

In fact, without the five-people-sitting-in-chairs-in-a-straight-line blocking (or non-blocking, as it were), I was actually able to focus on the story.  Horrible writing, sure, but it was way spookier, and not distractingly bad.  Not even funny.  Maybe even....a little scary.  Someone on stage got killed and I didn't even know who it was.  I grabbed my husband's arm, this time because I was into it, rather than because I was laughing.

But then the tech guy reconfigured the lights and light came up on the director prancing around stage over-acting, failing to make eye contact with anyone, staring at the ground and the walls and anywhere but the other characters (including his "parents," who were probably younger than he was), and I slumped back dejectedly.  The definition of bad direction: when you remove it and the play gets better.  I think the #1 rule of direction should be "Do no harm."

The third piece didn't have any direction, so I thought it was great.  It was just one woman reading a scary story.  My husband fell asleep during it, though.

The fourth piece was the best.  When the lead woman announced, "I'm calling the police!" and proceeded to pretend to punch in abut 14 numbers on her phone, I laughed (silently) so hard I cried.  When she stirred a pot of food she was cooking with the spoon about 2 inches above the pot, I had to bury my face in my husband's shoulder as I shook (not helpful, because he was also shaking with laughter and had tears streaming down his face).  When the director randomly decided he was going to be British for this short, I had to stifle a guffaw.

For most of this short, the director was heard but not seen, a spooky, randomly faux-British voice of a spectre that the main characters could see but we could not because he was just off stage—the first directorial choice of the evening I agreed with.  I found myself consciously hoping that he would never be seen in this piece, so it was with disappointment that I saw him finally make his appearance... only to once again stand and face straight out towards the audience as he spoke to a character...very slowly....

I tend to speak very quickly, and my husband tends to speak very slowly (at least relative to me).  One of the things I sometimes subconsciously do that understandably annoys him is to make a gesture with my hand like "speed up, spit it out” when I feel that he's taking a long time to get to his point.  So one of my final big laughs of the night came when I noticed my husband doing that same gesture during the director's final monologue, which was delivered at about half pace.  Then what was clearly the last line was delivered and a sound cue moved in... a long, slow sound cue.  We were crawling very slowly to the finish line, about 15 minutes after we should have reached it, but it seemed we might never get there.  My husband and I both had our hands up poised ready to clap, intermittently making the "hurry up" gesture as the lights did the slowest fade-out in the history of theatre, the actors frozen in place painfully.  My husband did one clap.  No one joined in.  We started silently giggling and then I just dove in clapping as loud as I could, both to bring the thing to an end and to ensure that these brave souls got some hearty applause.

And so that's the story of the funniest play I've ever seen in my life.  "You're going to go easy on them in your blog, right?" my husband asked after the cast had bowed and the audience stopped applauding.  

Then the director took a second bow, forcing the audience awkwardly to applaud him.

I looked at my husband. "Except on him. I'm not going easy on him."

The morals of this story: If you think you're the best person to play the lead role in a play you're directing, you're probably not; if you think you're the best person to play the lead role in three plays you're directing, you're definitely not; if you think you're so talented you don't need to put any learning or study into a skill before you put it on display, you're wrong; if you think left and right are interchangeable, you're wrong; 911 has three digits; spoons don't work unless they touch what they're stirring; sound cues are frequently better skipped than late; if you never make eye contact, you look creepy; flat lines on stage are bad; it takes a lot of courage to get up on stage in front of an audience, and the people who do that deserve a director worthy of their trust; I have no business ever being in the front row of a play again; and life is more fun when you have someone to laugh with.

The storm before the calm

I wrote this a few nights after I wrote my previous blog post but never got around to posting it. Since my husband keeps asking if the video at the end has made it into a blog post, now it has...

My night:

I can't go anywhere because along with my husband 40 miles away at the beach (at a work retreat in a rented house with his department, which consists of him and 8 women, where as the only man he gets the master bedroom and bath and balcony) is our car.  Having just moved in, I'm completely stir crazy and at all moments on the point of tears because I feel totally trapped and isolated and feel like I have no control over my environment.  I'm not in walking distance of anything but a Walgreens and a vacant strip mall, where the lone holdout is a CBD store that says "Family Video" on its faded 1980s marquee but would appear to be not so much into the "family" part anymore, and after I attempted to walk the 2.5 miles to the nearest commercial area, I was halted a mile and a half in by the abrupt end of sidewalk. I've seen no human beings all day except through car windows because walking is apparently not a mode of transportation here, something I find more than a little depressing.  I have, however, seen many geese and ducks when I took a walk-around-a-lake detour in my failed shopping attempt... where not one other human was taking advantage of the beautiful scenery.  On top of feeling all day like I was in the William Shatner episode of the Twilight Zone where there are no other humans, I've also been dealing with an extremely high-energy cat who has no room to run, because my husband left the evening the movers came, so there are boxes piled so high and precariously in the bedroom I can't reach them and can't make the bedroom safe for the cat, so I've just closed the door, confining us both to the living room and my office, which are configured in such a way that he can't run without the bedroom being open.  So he howls and howls and cries and cries and has twice today attempted to free-run and fallen awkwardly on his back or stomach (once landing in his food and water bowls and making a mess everywhere) and terrified me that he might have some horrible internal injury after he just lay down and closed his eyes after his second fall.  He looks up at me and begs me to make things so he can run, and all I can do is tell him I know exactly how he feels and I'm right there with him.  Then tonight a monster storm hit, with sirens going off, the sounds of monsters banging on our front door and window (that's what my cat thinks, at least), and the lights flickering on and off.  The lights flickering panicked me because while I knew exactly where our flashlights were in our NYC apartment, my husband was the one to pack them the day we drove, and I hadn't any idea where they were now, and unlike New York, there would be no ambient light if the power went out.  Here, we'd be in complete blackness.  So I frantically called and texted my husband asking him to please tell me where the flashlights were, passionately hating that I was powerless on my own to either lift boxes and make the space livable or find flashlights to take care of myself and my cat.

So that was my night.  Meanwhile, this was my husband's (and Mrs. Robinson's?) night, as texted while I was in the middle of scooping litter.

Post Script:

My husband came home to this on our refrigerator magnet wall.

Post post script:
I have now gotten to drive and unpack, the bedroom is accessible and set up, the cat has stopped howling and can run and jump and be his crazy self, and I have gotten a theatre fix in with a quick vacation to the Stratford Festival, so I no longer feel like ripping my hair out.  However, my husband is still on litter duty.

The Beginning

Saturday morning, the day my husband and I left New York for our new home in Michigan, I donned a T-shirt with Animal from The Muppets that says "Stay Wild" in big pink letters across the front.  My feet were clad in Wonder Woman socks, hidden beneath my Donald Duck Vans sneakers featuring Donald throwing variations of his crazy temper tantrums.  I wanted a cute picture of me doing a leap on the roof of our apartment building right before we left, or in front of the packed car before getting in, and I was going to post it on Facebook with something like "And so I leave New York as I came—a mismatched wild animal" or "Some things have changed a lot in the 13 years since I arrived in New York and some not at all," or "New Yorker or not, forever wild" or something better and funnier (give me a break; I was still working on it and haven't had nearly enough sleep to turn a phrase well.)

I should have known better. Especially after the last time we moved.

As it turned out, my moment walking out of our apartment wasn't quite so glamorous, and I most definitely did not want anyone taking my picture.  After a late night packing everything the movers didn't take the day before our drive and desperately hoping it would fit in the rental minivan we had not yet seen, I didn't get any sleep because our cat spent the night howling, wondering where everything had gone.  I'd pet him to sleep, I'd stand up to go back to "bed" (an inflatable air mattress that unfortunately wasn't inflated because the air pump's battery died five seconds after turning on), and he'd start howling again.  So it was with that night on top of five weeks of very little sleep that I got up (not woke up) Saturday morning to do the last bit of "throw random things in boxes" before getting a bright and early start on our 12-hour drive.

Except that it's hard to throw the remaining things in boxes when you've run out of boxes.  And as I was throwing things in trash bags to take with us instead, I realized that no one had cleaned the cabinets or the fridge (where is the cleaning fairy when you need her)? And then the car rental place didn't have a working minivan even though we'd reserved one a month ago. And then once we got a van, after packing it around where the cat's litter box would go, the litter box didn't fit. And then I spent 30 minutes trying to figure out how to keep the cat from getting under seats so we could let him out in the car. And then when trying to get him into his carrier (a Herculean feat), my husband accidentally closed his paw in the bathroom door. The cat didn't seem to notice, but I burst into tears. And they just wouldn't stop. The dam had broken, and there was no closing it.

"He's okay," my husband kept reassuring me. I nodded, wiping away my tears and hoping more wouldn't replace them, but of course they did.  

"Okay, say goodbye to our apartment!" my husband said cheerfully, on his way out.

*Blubber blubber, sniffle sniffle, hiccup, rub rub*

"What's wrong? Are you okay?" he asked.

"It's all of it.  It's just all of it," I said through the tears, a blubbery mess, waving him off as I looked back at the apartment one more time, a final wipe of my eyes as I pictured the last time it had been empty, when I'd sat on the kitchen counter, swinging my legs and singing along to Elle King's "Ex's and Oh's" coming from a portable radio during a break in cleaning the apartment before moving in. "All of it" was the years I'd spent in the city working towards a career there. It was the city-specific opportunities and potential I was still mourning. It was the fact that I couldn't wake up and take ballet or lyrical class the next morning. It was the leftover tears I'd held back the night before during my last class at Broadway Dance Center—the same class I'd taken since I interned there in college. It was the moment as I walked from BDC to the Long Island Rail Road when I'd looked up at the lights in Times Square, which I'd first seen so many years ago during my internship when my parents had taken me to Wicked the night they helped me get set up. It was the fact I hadn't slept much in five weeks. It was the myriad stresses of moving.  And it was my cat's paw.  I really love my cat.  And he has very cute paws.

My husband nodded, understanding I can have many conflicting emotions all at once that just have to play out, and he closed the door behind us.

A giggle escaped through my tears as we took the elevator down to the lobby. "I should do a blog post about how I wanted a cute leaping photo as I leave New York, and instead I'm a blubbery mess," I said. 

"I'll get one of you sprawled on the floor of our new home tonight with Mister [our cat]. You can use that to contrast with what you thought you were going to get," he said smiling.

Except that didn't happen either. Because we didn't get on the road until 1:45 pm. So instead of sprawling on the floor of our new apartment that night, I sprawled on a motel bed somewhere in Ohio—still in my Animal t-shirt (which the front desk lady loved) because everything I needed and had carefully packed for an overnight stay was of course in a bag that was unreachable unless we unpacked the whole car.

The next morning, because our motel room opened directly to outside, my husband and I took turns going to breakfast in the motel lobby so one of us could make sure our cat didn't escape. My husband went first, and when he came back, he told me that the front desk lady from the previous night was still on duty, and the other people eating breakfast consisted of a bunch of men in their 50s and 60s.  I looked down at my Animal t-shirt.  Though the front desk lady was very nice, I really didn't want her to see me wearing the same shirt the following morning.  I looked at my backpack, the only thing I had brought into the motel room with me.  It was still packed as a dance bag. I rifled through it, hoping I had something that would pass as a shirt.  Leotard… leotard.. leotard… tights… spandex shorts… cut up black T-shirt! Success! I pulled out the T-shirt.  Not good

"Broadway Bares: New York Strip!" was sprawled across the front in big neon yellow letters

"What do you think?" I asked my husband, holding up the shirt from the Broadway Cares/Equity Fights Aids annual benefit event that brings together the Broadway community.

He let out a guffaw. "Pretty sure no one here knows what Broadway Bares is. So walk of shame for the woman at the front desk or what looks like a stripper shirt in a room full of middle-aged men. Good luck."

I turned the shirt inside out and put it on. I had cut it up to wear as a warm-up shirt over a leotard, so it fell off one shoulder, showing my neon green sports bra underneath. Which matched my teal leggings.

"A little better," he said. "Better than wearing Animal two days in a row. Go for it."

So I said hello to the front desk lady and ate breakfast in the breakfast room surrounded by a bunch of middle-aged men, wearing teal leggings and an inside-out t-shirt hiding the words "bares" and "strip." I eaves dropped on everyone and thought that A. Everyone was remarkably friendly, and B. Everyone had very strange accents.

Eventually that day, Sunday, we got to our new home in Michigan. I was too exhausted to take any pictures, cute or otherwise.

Monday I went out for the first time to the drugstore. When I tried to spell my name for the cashier to get my rewards card, she couldn't understand any of my vowel sounds because here it would seem I'm the one with a strange accent. I had to type in my own name on her computer because the way I pronounce "O", "L", and "A" is apparently incomprehensible to someone with a Western Michigan accent.

When I got back to the winding-street apartment complex, I had to call my husband and ask him to describe where our building was because every one of the many buildings on the complex looks exactly identical to all the others, and the signs with directions to building numbers conveniently have an 11-number gap that includes ours, and I was so exhausted when we got in the previous night that I couldn't remember.  I walked up to what I thought was our apartment, but it had a hanging pot of flowers on the porch, and I was pretty sure I hadn't hung a pot of flowers there the previous night. My husband laughed at me a lot and directed me to our building. I still have no idea where our garage stall is. I totally identify with all the stories about people in Levittown going home to the wrong house.

Then today the movers came with all our stuff. In a thunderstorm. The leader of the crew, who had an arrow earring through two holes in his ear, tattoos up and down his arms, and a wad of tobacco in his mouth the whole time, opened with "They send me to all the murder capitals!”  This isn’t a murder capital, so I’m still not sure what he was getting at. Maybe it’s a badge of honor. Maybe he likes to check off murder capitals. Throughout the next five hours he insulted the city numerous times and closed by saying to me, “So now you’re probably going to put him to work unpacking all this, huh?”

"No, actually I'm going to do it myself because he has to leave for a work event," I said, bristling at the misogynistic undertone.

"Work event. Is that what they're calling it now?" he asked, letting out a big laugh. "My wife is a U.S. Marshall, so I get wanting to leave. I spend as little time at home as possible. Good luck, man," he said to my husband.  I promptly took out my phone and started writing a review.

I feel really bad for his wife.

And that brings me to now... writing this blog on the couch, ignoring the 40 boxes behind me and the additional disaster zone of a bedroom that I've closed off because the boxes are stacked so high I can't make them safe for our cat.  I've got two boxes next to the couch to use as a coffee table, the air mattress set up in my office, which is blissfully box-free, central air on for the first time since I lived at my parents' house, and a short story up that I'm proofing before I submit it to literary magazines.  Oh, and my husband's work event? Yeah he's at a retreat at a rented house near the beach with his department from work, which consists of him and eight women. As the only man, he has the master bed and bath and balcony while everyone else shares.

So maybe this isn't quite how I pictured my first night in our new home with all our stuff. But here's the upside:

A. My sister-in-law assured me it's safe to use my glass tea kettle with a glass-ceramic electric stovetop, so I have hot tea and didn't cause a tea kettle bomb. (As she pointed out, it would have been great for my blog if it had exploded, but I'll take the boring route this time.)

B. Central air.

C. My books are here.

D. Central air.

E. I have wireless Internet finally after my husband spent an hour on the phone with the cable company.

F. Central air.

G. I finished a story.

H. Grass. Trees. And there's a swing set on our apartment complex. If I can find it again.

I. I found the bus stop to take me to the Grand Rapids Ballet for class there.

J. While I didn't know how to end my last blog post because I was too exhausted, I don't know how to end this one because it's not an ending—it's just the beginning.

Part 3.... and 4 and 5 and 6 and 7

Over the last few weeks, I've started to write several blog posts... and I always get too tired to finish them.  Turns out living on your own as an adult when you're also packing for a cross-country move and showing the apartment and working is exhausting (especially with a cat who guarantees you only get five hours of sleep max a night).  So instead of the weekly installments I intended, here's a little summary of how the weeks have played out for me and how my five-week “adventure” of living on my own for the first time as an adult has evolved.

Week 1:

I went to a rock concert by myself for the first time this week.  As I walked up to the venue in search of the will-call line, the two different giant lines out on the sidewalk confused me, so I asked a guy who looked like he knew what he was doing if one was for "will call."  The guy turned out to be the band's tour manager and escorted me inside to the box office, where he told the woman there to "take care of" me.  I was unable to convince box office lady I wasn't with the band, despite two denials, and she handed me a ticket without ever checking my reservation.  The venue was a mixture of tables at the front, standing room in the middle, and a bar at the back.  I was seated at a table with a couple and another single girl, who clearly felt very awkward and uncomfortable being there alone and looked as if she were trying to fold in on herself.  As soon as I was seated and ordered my tea (because that's a normal rock concert drink, right?) I pulled out The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (I had to pack most of my books already, so I chose a 500-page book to tide me over), because reading some British protofeminist literature while waiting for a rock concert to start is also normal, right?  After staring at me for 30 seconds, the single girl across from me reached for her bag, dug around, and pulled out her 500 page book.  We never spoke to each other, but we both read contentedly across from each other for over half an hour, two quiet girls amid a sea of beer-drinking, chatting, laughing couples. 

Near the end of the concert, as all the bills were being dropped on tables for drinks and/or food, I became aware I didn't have a bill.  As soon as the concert ended, I asked a waiter why I didn't get a bill.  "Don't worry about it," he said with a smile and walked off.

So that was my first solo rock concert.  Other things I intend to do in the next several weeks: Go back to the Metropolitan Museum of Art one more time, go to the Teddy Roosevelt Birthplace house/museum, and visit Grant's tomb.

Week 2:

My TV broke.  "Broke" is actually putting it gently.  It became possessed when it was already powered off and screamed like a banshee at two in the morning and refused to turn off again with the power switch, so I pulled the plug on it.  This is my cat's reaction after I pulled the plug: 

I tried to plug it back in briefly, and it repeated its banshee screams, so it's been unplugged ever since. And I have rediscovered BBC Radio 4, which I loved in college.  So now instead of having The Golden Girls and Murder, She Wrote on late at night (how old am I?), I'm listening to discussions about monkeys who can make robots in other countries run on a treadmill just by thinking about it, debates on the morality of bringing back wooly mammoths (yes, the technology is there, albeit with elephant genes to fill gaps) and other extinct and soon-to-be-extinct species, a series on the history of ideas, short documentaries on the perception of time, and Inspector Alleyn mysteries (hey, I have to replace Murder, She Wrote with something comparable).  My conclusion: Contemporary British radio is far more interesting than contemporary American TV.  Also, after listening to so many Brits talking for so long, the first time in the day that I hear a real live person speak here in the city, their accent jars my ear for about 15 seconds as I hear their American accent, which is a very strange experience.

Week 3:

I don't remember week three. It went by in two seconds.  I got about eight hours of sleep total for the week, and I started to get really sick of packing—and taking the vacuum cleaner out of the boiler room.  I really, really, really hate lifting up our stupid vacuum cleaner to move it out into the living room.  On the upside, this is the week I became a packing-tape zen master.  I can now tape up a box in record time.  I have conquered the packing tape and I am its master.

My cat enjoying some of the boxes I have masterfully taped:

Week 4:

In week four someone started banging on my apartment door.  And ringing the bell. At any random time of day—or in one case, night, which was the scariest because after he rang and knocked aggressively, I could see through the peephole that the guy started sorting through keys as if looking for one to use on the door, and he only went away when my neighbor serendipitously happened to come home.  I assume these are loonies who want to see the apartment because they've seen it listed on rental sites all over the Internet, but they still freak me out, especially after seeing the guy take out keys.  So starting in week four, I began barricading my door—not just placing heavy items in front of it, but working out the geometry of it in a chain of boxes from the door to the wall so that no amount of force can open the door.  When I'm out of the apartment, I still barricade the door so that only someone as tiny as I am can get in.  Week four is also when I started having to really work to remember to eat dinner because all I wanted to do (or had time to do) at night was go to sleep.  At one point I asked my husband over the phone if he’d make me spaghetti, but he said no. Bummer.  

Week 5:

This week I'm exhausted.  I took my last ballet class with my all-time favorite teacher today, and tomorrow will have two more "lasts" with other favorite ballet teachers.  After class at Steps on Broadway, I returned my last NYPL library book and then sat on the grassy knoll outside Lincoln Center, across from Juilliard, and had a lunch picnic while I called my husband and asked him to tell me how the Juilliard front I was looking at compared to its pre-renovation existence when he was there, and where scenes from the ballet cult movie Center Stage (from around the same time he was at Juilliard) were shot.  It was something we intended to do together but never got around to. Also this week, I finally met a young couple in our building for the first time.  In three and a half years here, my husband and I never met anyone.  And I met our landlord for the first time.  And when showing the apartment to one couple, the man of the couple looked at the bathtub (which is admittedly very nice for a New York City bathtub) and said very matter-of-factly, “Oh, that’s where our child will be conceived.”  My cat liked that couple.  But he doesn’t like everyone the realtor shows the apartment to.  He particularly disliked the guy who came in texting, never looked up, tried to film the whole tour, knocked over my cat’s water bowl without apologizing, and opened my fridge and all my drawers.  My cat has excellent people-judging skills.  Oh, and my cat has grown completely infatuated with his reflection this week.  This is him admiring himself:

With two more days until my husband arrives to help me finish packing, here are my conclusions about my first time living alone as an adult:

1. I’m glad I did it, because it was hard.

2. It’s hard. It’s hard to never have anyone to help you do anything, whether that’s doing a full litter change or vacuuming the apartment or making dinner after a really long day or doing the dishes when you’re tired or waking up to reassure the cat three times in a night that no one’s going to pack him in a box or forget him. 

3. Care packages from my parents are the best.  I already knew this, but they’re especially nice when you just want a break and want someone to take care of you for a bit. (I say this with a homemade brownie and a tangerine from my mom to the side of my computer.)  Also, the notes in care packages are the best.  In the age of Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and e-mail, there’s something so wonderful and personal about an actual handwritten note, especially when you’re alone.

4. I have more respect than ever for my mom, who packed a house while taking care of a newborn (me), a 21-month-old, and two cats, one of whom was going blind and dying of leukemia.  Any one of those things is hard on its own, and she dealt with all of them at the same time while my dad was at the office all day.  I feel these last couple weeks like I don’t know how to squeeze out any extra energy sometimes, and I can’t even conceive of doing what she did.  My mom is Wonder Woman.

5. Of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Teddy Roosevelt house museum, and Grant’s tomb, I made it to… none of them.

6. While I’m sure there is some way to wrap up this post on a note that is both witty and wistful, comedic yet meaningful, self-deprecating yet self-aware, I haven’t the faintest notion how to do that because I really really really really really need a nap.  I’m going to go take a shower, put on my “I Can’t Adult Today” t-shirt, and go to bed.  And when I wake up, I’ll be one day away from someone else helping to do the litter, the vacuuming, the packing, and the waking up at odd hours of the night to comfort our cat.  Maybe he’ll even make me spaghetti.

Part Two

The other day I was talking with someone about the discrepancy between the partial truth people project on the internet and the full truth that puts it in context.  We were talking specifically about the videos ballet dancers put on Instagram—videos that show clean quintuple pirouettes without showing the ones where they fall down or hop, or without showing that those same dancers can't do triples in time to music or aren’t great jumpers, or pictures that show incredible over-extension without showing they don't have the strength to hold it, et cetera—but the same concept could apply to almost anyone who puts anything about him- or herself on the internet.  No matter how truthful what they show is, it's only one part of them.

For example, last week I posted a blog post I was quite proud of about living on my own for the first time as an adult.  I smiled when I finished and felt like I should blast some girl-power pop music (yes please, Katy Perry) and strut off into my five-week adventure as a strong, independent woman capable of tackling anything.

So just to be fair, I feel I should balance that out by saying that I haven’t slept well once since my husband left because my cat has the energy of a whole litter of kittens (fun when there are two of you, insatiable when there’s just one) and meows asking to play every night, several times a night, plus he hates change and is convinced I have hidden my husband away and meows at doors asking me to bring him out of hiding, and then today, totally exhausted, while trying to tape up boxes to pack, I found myself sitting on the floor of my living room full-on ugly crying because some evil person who hated other human beings invented packing-tape dispensers that don't dispense tape without it twisting every which way and getting stuck to the dispenser, and then when you finally get it free it bursts forward and the whole dispenser, blade and all, jerks out of your control, and on top of that the only way to keep the bottom of the box shut as I’m taping it is to squeeze the thing with a Xenia Onatopp death grip with my thighs, so that as I was sitting there with a tangled mess of tape in my lap and a box that was thoroughly not taped, as the tears flowed, I had to wonder if I would ever finish packing or if I'd still be sitting there on the floor when my husband comes back in a few weeks, afraid that if I ever did get the tape mess sorted out and detached from the plastic thingy part (yes, isn't my vocabulary impressive?) of the dispenser, it would just come bursting out with such force that the blade would slice open my leg or cut off my finger.  And then I texted my husband that I was having trouble with it and he called me and I was unintelligibly cry-talking and he was silent on the other end, and I said "Hello?" and he said, "Yeah," in a way that clearly meant "I have no idea what I'm supposed to say here because you've obviously totally lost it."

...So I just thought I should put out there that being a strong woman doesn’t necessarily preclude packing-tape meltdowns.  (Though to be fair, there's a decent chance that my crying on the floor about the dumb, evil tape dispenser had something to do with my emotions being all "Hey!  Here's a metaphor for how we feel about leaving New York and what we're leaving behind!" and wasn't entirely about the actual tape....  But I still really passionately hate that tape dispenser.)

And I wound up taping up five boxes.  And painted my nails with glitter mood nail polish that currently says my mood is “awesome.”  Now where’s my Katy Perry CD?