Group activities I don't understand

Here's a male activity that I don't understand: the collective cleaning of the car.

Every few months, My neighbor and his friends roll a baby shopvac out of his apartment, the cord trailing fifteen feet to his front door, and proceed to vacuum, dust and polish the car's interior. I've never seen them wash the outside of the car, presumably because there aren't any water hookups on the parkinglot side of the building. But the inside of this guy's car gets top at-home treatment.

Now in the nine years I've been driving my current vehicle, I think I've vacuumed it out twice. I probably have wiped down the dashboard a few more times, but that's mostly because when you transport cats over distance, they deposit fuzz, cage or no cage.

Would it be nice if the interior of my car was cleaner? Yes.

Do I feel the need to clean it? No.

I'd much rather exert cleaning effort on clothes, dishes, and hard to reach surfaces like the area behind my headboard which may be the cause of some of my nighttime stuffiness. Breathe Right strips, myass.

I understand that my cleanliness priorities don't line up with everyone else's. And I understand that there's just something about the bond between a dude and his car that invokes this sort of monthly activity. Yes, yes, grunting manly noises. Agreed.

Here's what I really don't get: all the dude's friends that help clean the car. 

Last week, there were four dudes out there cleaning. Willingly. It wasn't that they were being punished or that they wouldn't see their allowance if they didn't help. These were just four dudes, out there cleaning a sedan that last year sat in the same spot for four weeks with a flat tire. They didn't bring their own cars to clean, so it wasn't a "having a crew gets a big job done quicker" thing and it wasn't about being close to a super cool sports car -- although the rims on this thing could blind someone if the light hits them right. It was just an "I'm going to help my friend clean his car" thing. And I don't get it. I've volunteered my help to many friends many times -- sometimes even for cleaning -- but never have I helped a friend clean the inside of a car. Nor have I been asked to help. Sure, my parents made me when I was younger, but that's a wholly different power structure.

Odyssey workshop deadline approaches, and my neighbors go crazy; events that are, sadly, unrelated

I attended Odyssey in 2010.  Odyssey Fantasy Writing Workshop is a six week, intensive writing workshop for those who are serious about speculative fiction. There's an application process, a huge time commitment, a steep fee, and almost unlimited possibility for growth as a writer.

If you write speculative fiction and you've thought about applying to Odyssey but are on the fence: do it.

It's worth it.

The application deadline is April 8 (that's a receive by date!).  I waffled a lot while thinking about applying.  First there was the fee to apply, which made me wonder if it was a scam --  it's not, if you're willing to take my word on it, but it is a means of cutting back on the number of applicants so that this very small operation isn't overwhelmed with aps to read.  I also kept thinking I'd apply next year, when I was done with my MFA and had time to write and finish a speculative story.  The speculative short story idea dropped into my lap accidentally (turns out I couldn't keep my genre from showing at workshop like I thought I could) and I got angry enough to apply (more on that story on that here), and the experience was wonderful.  I'm so excited I didn't put it off til next year which we all know can indefinitely become next year.

This workshop is not about dissection. It does not open up your story like a frog in biology class, then walk away with the stomach gaping and the liver pinned to a board. This workshop is about surgery. It identifies the cancerous masses in your story and removes them, closes up, then starts the patient on a course of follow-up treatments. If you're not cool with someone discussing ways to fix (i.e. change) or possibly re-write your story then maybe you shouldn't apply.  I've posted an entire page on my experience and assessment with the workshop.

My neighbors, however, are not gaga over the chance to learn story structure and resolve narrative weaknesses.  They are batshit crazy over St. Patrick's day, Guinness, and cheap beer -- green or otherwise.

At Western Michigan University, the students take their drinking holidays very seriously.

Starting at noon when I opened my windows today, the noise and the clad-in-green-tee-shirt foot traffic has steadily increased.  The party attitude would be present regardless of the weather, but the fact that the temp has broken sixty degrees for the first time in weeks helps a lot.

I'd say that it's a great time to gather real world dialog without leaving my apartment, but the dialog mostly sounds like:

Dude: I'm gonna get piss-ass wasted.
Girl: I've gotta be at work at five.
Dude: What? Why? Call in drunk.

So maybe not all that useful.

I will not be going anywhere. I will be holed up inside, tolerating the noise and not getting on the road with any of them. Previous observation of antics in this neighborhood leads me to believe that by 9:30 PM the fights in the parking lot will start, yelling and/or fist fights, (usually they begin around 2:00 AM) and by 10:30 or 11:00 things will be quiet again -- not even 21 year-olds can sustain 12+ hours of intoxication and partying.

And finally some absolutely fabulous geekery and British humor.  Love.

See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.

Redefining ones self

It's u-Haul season in my neighborhood. Orange and white trucks and trailers are parked everywhere. Some with the words PRINCE EDWARD ISLAND painted on them, and then a map so we dumb Americans can figure out where the hell Price Edward Island is (somewhere between Maine and the Arctic Circle). Others proclaim that Florida is THE MANATEE STATE. And there's one with a giant nasty spider on it that might have words, but I'm too grossed out to look at long enough to read.

Last Friday I would have seen fewer beds in a mattress store. Friday was the BIG move in day for the college students and they've been trickling in ever since. But my apartments offer the option of furnished units if you're willing to pay more and you don't really care that most of the furniture belonged to someone else. Apparently the last thing to be delivered into these furnished units was the bed. A parade of three guys, hired to life and tote for the day, walking from the club house with full mattresses held over their heads/backs trotted past my window again and again. The frames they delivered with a truck.

In all of this, I continue to write, to work on cleaning and organizing my apartment to (a) make it my own little haven, (b) make me feel proud of my space, (c) benefit my mental health. Every so often I dread moving even though I have a lease for the next 12 months. I hate moving when you've just gotten things they way you've wanted them. However the water quality here is for shit. There's so much sediment in the water that my dishwasher is coated with orange, my shower curtain is tinted the same shade, and my Brita pitcher dies every month instead of every two months like it's supposed to. But hey, at least it's a cute apartment.

I've been doing a lot of who am I? what do I want? thinking the past month or two. I've come up with some answers that surprised myself. Some were a long time coming, some weren't. I then got around to the question of so if that's me, how do I want to present myself? is that how I've been presenting myself?

Take this blog, for example. A couple years ago, I recrafted my identity to be all about being a grad student in a writing program. I really wanted to be literary back then. Now I'm much more concerned with being an interesting person/writer than being let into the "literary writers" club. Oh, I'll keep writing, but I'm much more concerned with being interesting than being literary.

I also redid my bio on the side bar and I'm about to redo my bio on the About page. It was all about where I went to school and what I did that added clout to my literaryness. Yawn. Then I read the big fat Bio-writing lie (via). Now it is much more entertaining.

And then the cat who had been sleeping on my desk rolled over and would have fallen to the ground if not for the fact that she reached out her claws into my conveniently placed thigh. Guess that's as good a sign as any that I should end the post.

Tales of Woe, Part 9

I thought that with the procurement of the half curtain that I wouldn't see any more of my neighbor's stupidity. I was wrong.

With my protective curtain up I couldn't see my neighbors but I could smell cigarette smoke. This was annoying because I have several fans pulling air into my apartment so that I can run the AC only when it gets over 85F. Annoying, yes, but not worth dropping water balloons on their heads or anything as the smoke smell usually lasts only a couple of minutes.

Then I started to smell charcoal grill smell. Which was really odd because the complex doesn't let us grill at all since the rash of apartment fires in town that happened a couple years ago. At first it was no gas grills within X feet of the building, then no grills at all.

Next, a large vehicle is idling in my street. This causes me to get up and look over my half curtain. I've been towed once from in front of my own damn apartment so I'm kinda nervous about getting towed again.

Is it the tow truck? Nope. Firetruck.

What the @^%&!

So I do the nosy neighbor thing, going from one window to the next to try and get a better view of what's going on and/or see if my building is burning. Seriously, right. That's when I see that the hose has been turned on the construction dumpster that's taking up four parking spaces.

Inside the construction dumpster is a guy in full fireman gear digging around while the other guy hoses down all the material that is and/or could be burning.

Great. Thanks neighbors! I really appreciate it when you start fires in really large dumpsters!

Somehow this is more unnerving than finding the charred skeleton of what could only have been a sleeper sofa at the end of my street. At least with the sofa skeleton, I got the impression that it was lit on fire so that someone could watch it burn; the dumpster, however, just happened.

From where you write

The title, btw, is a play on Robert Olen Butler's From Where You Dream, a slightly pretentious guide to writing that, in spite of its pretentiousness, possesses the ability to stretch the way you think about your process of writing.

I've made a significant change to my writing space and, hopefully, to my productivity as well.

When I set up my desk, I purposefully placed it so that it faced out a window.  Multiple different set ups in many different rooms over the years had proved to me that I am happiest when closest to a source of daylight and when I can let my eyes focus on something far away instead of a big ol wall 18-24" from my nose.  Thus, the original set up.

If you'll notice, out that window is another apartment building.  Between it and my window is a street with some parking (you can't see it from this angle, but trust me, it's there).  It is from this perch that I watch the bizarre and stupid antics of my neighbors.  They are often entertaining, and just as often scary and repulsive (see Tales of Woe).  And, while stories of grown men running from invisible bees are fun to blog about, they are very, very distracting when trying to get thedamnwriting done.

In my final private meeting at Odyssey, it was suggested to me that, perhaps, in front of a window was not the best place to do my writing.

I balked, then panicked.

Take away the light? No!  The ability to focus off in the distance? No! Don't wanna. Can't make me. Gonna throw a fit!

Then two weeks later, returning to my apartment, I thought, what the hell? Why not have it both ways?

I went out and purchased a pressure rod and hung a half curtain in the window.  At first I had delusions of grandeur about sewing a curtain -- I have fabric and a sewing machine, and a curtain requires skills only one step above zero -- but then I got lazy (a.k.a. practical) and realized that I could have a curtain immediately without unearthing the sewing machine in an already messy apartment (thank you unpacking for making that mess) if I just draped a pretty sarong over the pressure rod.

Blocking out 18" of window and neighbors has drastically changed my writing space.

Even just taking the before and after pictures was crazy-different.  Previously my camera wanted to auto-focus outside, no flash, causing everything to be backlit.  Now it wants to focus on the desk space, and use a flash.  Yes, there's (slightly) less light to work by, but like my camera, my focus has changed.

The difference when I sat down at the computer was immediately noticeable.   Things felt more grounded.  It mentally puts me in a workspace that's all my own.  In fact, when the window is open and I can hear people talking below it now makes me jump because I had no concept of them until they made noise; I'm completely in my own zone doing my own thing -- a much more productive thing.

And I no longer feel creepy because I am watching all that goes on on the street below me.  Creepy creepy writer person.  The cats will be pissed that they can no longer sit in the window -- in fact they've already attempted to chew and claw their way through the barrier -- but they'll either figure out how to get behind it or they will learn to cope as is.  I am heartless.

This is already the best under-$5 writing investment I've ever made.

I can still see the roofs, trees and sky.  On Sunday afternoon I watched two hawks circling high up on currents of hot air. Two became three, circling without flapping. They they glided away, and I went back to typing. The occasional hawk in the distance, or song bird close-up, is a welcome distraction. A rather un-distracting distraction considering the alternative.

I've been thinking about doing this for two years, but I had to spend six weeks in New Hampshire to finally act on it.

What about you -- what's your ideal writing space? Do you have your ideal working space now, or is there something about it you'd like to change? And (forgive me for goading) why not change it now?

Oh no.

There is a piece of ugly brown furniture on the grassy swath between apartment and sidewalk across the street. Above it a guy is leaning out the second floor balcony with a Heineken mini-keg. His buddy grabs it and puts it on the ground beside the ugly brown chair; he goes inside.

Oh no.

I'm hoping against hope that this is the product of them moving out of the apartment.

The guy comes out the door of the apartment with a matching ugly, brown upholstered chair. Buddy comes back out. Through the window Guy hands buddy some sort of sound system. Buddy rests it on top of the air conditioning unit. Guy feeds the electrical cord out.

Oh shit.

Buddy goes back in, comes out with a glass and a black lab puppy. He pours a beer, takes a seat. Lets the dog sniff around. Guy comes out wearing swim trunks over boxers (both are visible) and nothing else.

Crap.

Up until this moment I really thought I lived in too high a rent district for this to happen.

Edit: Three hours later there is a third piece of ugly brown upholstery -- how many of these things do they have? -- and there's a chick sitting in it.

Rainy Friday

It's been raining for several days now. I kinda like it. It makes the temperature bearable and I love the sound of plinking into puddles and trickling down the storm drain. Besides, it's the one time when there's that earthy smell that is simply rain.

When I lived in Chicago rain meant a battle. A struggle against getting too soaked walking, against puddles, against overhands ready to turn into waterfalls, against car tires spraying up walls of dirty, gritty water.

I'm so glad I moved.

Although the sounds of the night are different they are still remarkably the same. Instead of hearing homeless guys fight in the middle of the night and the 161 bus ding that it has arrived then ding again that the doors are closing, I awoke several times last night to the sound of a couple fighting.

Around 3:00 a.m. a car peeled out of the parking lot making the strangest noise given all the water sloshing around.

At 5:00 a.m. he's back and banging on the door of the apartment then on the window of his girlfriend's bedroom. Cindy let me in. I'm sorry. let me in, okay? Then Fuck it, Cindy, let me in. Then You want me to wait? Fine I can fucking wait and the car door slams again as he sits out in his car patiently waiting.

Or not so patiently as thirty minutes later he's back to banging on the window and yelling into the glass before he again slams the car door and peels out of here.

They only moved in a few days ago; this could be an interesting year. Much more entertaining than the homeless guys in Chicago.

Crazy Neighbors: Part III

This incident happened over labor day weekend and given how frequently I repeated it to people I thought that I had blogged it before this.

I was blissfully asleep. The party must have been hosted at some other apartment so the neighbors that I share a bedroom wall with hadn't been blasting music that night. (Side note: last night the music was so loud that I could actually identify lyrics from that Carrie Underwood song about cheating.)

About 2:40 am: I am suddenly awakened. My window is open and two stories below there's a group of guys talking on the sidewalk. I realize what's happened and I stop paying attention and try to tune out their drunk heckling and go back to sleep.

Sleep, so close, so close.

Then somewhere an alarm starts going off. Idiots leaned against the wrong car or something.

The drunk heckling takes on a slightly different tone, one akin to oh, you're in deep shit now/that was so cool man. The guys leave and the voices stop.

The alarm is still going off fifteen minutes later. I'm beginning to think this isn't a car alarm.

Then two more voices outside my window.

Guy: So you’re just going to some strange guy’s house to have sex with him?
Girl: Well tomorrow’s Labor Day so it’s not like I have anything to do.
Guy: You’re so cool, you know that. You’re so cool.

Seriously?

I get out of bed and go into the living room. I am finally suspicious that this alarm might be coming from within my building. Sure enough, blinking through the peep hole of my front door is a strobe light.

I open the door and am practically deafened by the siren (how did I mistake this for a car alarm from my bedroom?) but over that there's a guy going down the stairwell is yelling to someone below "It wasn't pulled up here."

Okay well that answers that. Drunken idiots pulled the alarm. This was back when the "finishing touches" were still being put on my building by the construction crew. One of these final touches was the plate in the door frame that allows the door to stay closed and locked. So at this point, the door was wide open both day and night. Drunkies had reached just inside the door and pulled the alarm immediately to the left then laughed and ran away.

So, we're at the 25 minute mark when I hear pounding in the hallway. Hopeful that someone is fixing the situation! I peek out.

It's my neighbor -- whom I will now and forever refer to as Smoky because of his charming 5am introduction -- standing in the hallway, again wearing only gym shorts, with a hammer raised over his head. He is in the process of beating the crap out of the siren/strobe light warning unit on our landing.

Seriously?

We have a brief "wtf?" conversation over the noise and then I go back inside and look for an after hours emergency number, which I did not find. Meanwhile I'm watching outside and I see our friendly neighborhood rent-a-cop is leaning on a car on the other side of the street watching our stairwell.

Well if rent-a-cop already knows this is going on then I'm assuming there isn't anyone I can all that hasn't been anyway.

Then at about 3:15 am a little Toyota pulls up, parks in the middle of the street, talks to rent-a-cop and then goes into my building. About ten minutes later the siren, blissfully, stops.

Sleep!

So the next morning I open my door and there on the landing and all the way down the stairwell are the pieces of the siren/strobe light device that had been on the wall the night before.

I thought Smoky had given up on the hammer actually working. Nope. Looks like he really did beat the shit out of it. Casing, plastic mount, and computer circuits all just lying around not attached to one another or the wall.

So I gather up all the pieces in a grocery bag and turned it in to the office the next day. That shit looks expensive and I'm not paying for Smoky's anger management issues.

I Hate Undergrads

No, I don't have my students yet, the undergrads I'm referring to live all around me. They are "upperclassmen" if they even deserve the title.

I would start with a picture of team front-lawn-beer-pong-overlooking-construction but I can't find the cord to get such images off my digital camera.

But team-front-lawn-beer-pong is pretty much harmless except for the Coors Light cans that end up rolling under my Honda.

At 5 a.m. this morning someone starts banging on my door.

5: 18 a.m. to be exact.

I am immediately awake.

My leap from sleep is made even more sudden and startling by the fact that I'm sleeping on the futon in the living room not my bed. Last night at 1 a.m. I gave up trying to sleep in my bedroom because of the crazy bass coming through the wall and went to the living room where it was quieter. That music was so loud that I could occasionally even hear the treble.

Meanwhile, at 5:18 this guy is still knocking.

I grab my robe and finally open the door a hand span. There is a guy who looks no older than 17 with this crazy messy blond hair wearing gym shorts and nothing else.

He tells me that he was going to smoke, nods at the open apartment door across the hall, and said he was wondering if I'd like to join him.

This is my new neighbor. Oh.

I've never seen this guy before, that apartment was empty when I moved in, so my best bet is that he's just trying to be neighborly by sharing his weed and has no frickin concept that it is already 5 a.m.

I was polite, told him I had to work in the morning. He was apologetic for waking me. We didn't exchange names.

I went back to bed -- real bed this time -- because even the people with the uber-loud music weren't up at 5 a.m.