April 2009 article for the Charleston Magazine.

A memorable excerpt from the Blue Man Group show in Boston.

A voice from npr woke me up at 10:00am, as programmed. I noticed Josef was already out of bed, and wondered why so early when to bed so late.. then I remembered his meeting with the art agent. I got up to make him some coffee and heat up some leftover migas. He asked for the GPS, ate the microwaved breakfast, and hit the road before the coffee had come to a boil.

I finished preparing the coffee, then poured myself a cup. I sat down at the counter bar with a piece of toast and the comics page. Jumble. MODDEO. Hmm. D-O-M-E-..   no. I don’t know. Next one. NULGSY. Easy- SNUGLY. That’s a word, right? I’ll check the answers, they print the current day’s and not yesterday’s, right? “Answers,” okay… “DOOMED, SNUGLY—-“ damn. So the first one is DOOMED. Okay… LITSOL… hmm… STOLID? Yeah, that’s a word, Stolid. Alright, the last one, JEGNIL… JUNGLE? No… JIGGLE? No…. JINGLE. Yes, Jingle. Okay, the cartoon: “What the lingering lovers have before boarding the plane,” picture of star-eyed lovers hugging at gate, annoyed flight attendant standing by…

ANSWER: A “_ _      _ _ _ _      _ _     _ _ _ _”. Let’s see our boxed letters… O, O… S, N… S, L… N, G.. lot’s of the same letters here… okay.. um… “SO LONG?” Oh, let’s just look at the answer- So Long “So Long.” Oh. That’s lame, the phrase doesn’t even make sense.

Jumbles have been a recent luxury since staying with my parents. As well as hot showers, nearby toilets, dishwasher, big screen tvs, cats, air conditioning, heating, pubic library, and so on, and so on. I’m looking forward to missing all this, and then not missing any of it at all. (Except for the nearby toilets and showers. I’ll probably miss those at times.)

When my mom left to meet an old friend for lunch, I changed the living room’s tv from a soap opera to CNN. Obama was giving a town hall meeting in Elkhart, Indiana, a town I am aware of. The only reason I have ever heard of Elkfart is that its the RV capital of the world. Fleetwood, the company that manufactured our RV, is headquartered there. Knowing that the city’s industry is so steeped in recreational vehicles helps to explain why its unemployment rate is the highest in the country, around 15%. Ain’t nobody buying RVs right now.

The stimulus package Obama promoted in Elkhart was voted into effect tonight in D.C. I don’t understand how it will work, but I hope I’m just ignorant. Will it save us from sinking further or will it just throw on a couple more anvils of debt? How do you write “The United States of America” in Mandarin? Nevermind.

As for the rest of my day, I gave the handwash portion of my wardrobe it’s annual cleaning, I traveled to a busy shopping center to purchase a drying rack and brought it home to realize that its affordability was due to its assembly-requiredness, I got a screwdriver, and ultimately realized that snapping it together was quite fun.

I brainstormed ideas for an article about gardening, spending most of the time contemplating my complete lack of a green thumb and doodling strange mutant creatures.

Meanwhile, the late-night, comedy sandwich of Jon-Stephen-Conan played in the background. For the last couple of weeks I have been watching Conan O’Brien pretty religiously due to his encroaching takeover of the Tonight Show. Each show I watch is bittersweet, knowing that the end is only closer. I figure that Conan will not be able to transfer all of the quirkiness and spunk from this show into the more mainstream Tonight Show spot he will be filling. And for the record, Jay Leno sucks.

By the time it was truly late- 2:00am, Josef and I took our cabin-fever selves out of the house. We walked through the streets of my parents’ hilltop subdivision to a block without streetlamps. No signs of life. Josef mounted his camera upon the top of a drive-up, communal mailbox and set the shutter speed to several seconds. With flashlights, he and I drew pictures in the air that dissipate in real time but become visible within the camera’s image.

Amy