I don’t think i’m ever going to be able to live somewhere where i can’t sit in front of my computer in my underwear at odd hours of the night staring at the internet and trying to think of something to say.
by krisis
Kate works in an office where she occasionally has a few minutes to burn between projects, and ever since the blogathon she’s been filling all of those moments with a big heaping serving of Krisis. Seeing as i live with Kate and hang out with her on a day-to-day basis, she is definitely the regular reader most entangled in the actual living i’m doing short of Elise. After skimming for entries about her and then reading some random highlights, today she apparently resolved to read me all the way through, from day one on. I warned her that day one was about as long as June 2002, and she replied with a knowing smirk.
I’ve followed Kate’s lead and delved into some CK written from the old apartment, and it’s downright odd. I don’t remember writing like i did then – in constant fits and starts, or even thinking like that. Now every single post either sends me into a fit of laughter or a state of quiet contemplation, and sometimes both consecutively. And, though i’m sure it’s very amusing and thought-provoking on its own (heh), the highlights for me definitely connect to having been there when they were written… remembering how many times i fell to the ground in a fit of hysterical laughter on this night of drinking with Aim, laughing out loud at the nearly psychic advice doled out in this post, and remembering to read the commented out dream in this one, which i easily recollected almost blow for blow.
As much as i love making other people think, or laugh, or sing along, i think the best part of this is often just looking back and seeing exactly what i was like on a certain day nearly two years ago. It’s truly worth the effort.
Despite the veritable circus of animals i have lived with or adjacent to in my life, i have only once had a pet to call my own: a hamster, obtained from my sixth grade biology teacher. I remember that the event was quite a big to-do in my house at the time, although now i don’t see what was so incredibly unusual about keeping a rodent locked up in a tidy Habitrail cage. He wasn’t much of a pet, so much as i recall, except for that he had a hamster’s typical penchant for escape artistry, once sneaking out in the dead of night only to make a nest behind my door and another time squeezing out just to wait on my pillow for me to return home. I’m not sure why i didn’t play with him that often, other than that i was always afraid of being bitten and that i had a penchant for seeing him more as a proto-beanie-baby than a living breathing pet. An indeterminate time after i brought him home he died; one morning my gloved hand curled around his teddy-like body to find it stiff and unrecoiling.
Lindsay has a hamster downstairs, Mimi, who is either named after a character from Rent or Drew Carey depending on who you ask. To wit, she fits with both: loud, proud, and rather large. In fact, most visitors to the house estimate her to be much closer to guinea pig than hamster, and some even recommend that she has enough body mass to aspire to ferret size if properly stretched.
The most important thing about Mimi is that she is just about the best pet ever. She’s low-maintenance, eating only one full dish of food each week – which would seem to indicate that she has the most obscenely low metabolism known to man or mouse, as she has no trouble maintaining and increasing her near-free-roaming-pet size. She’s very docile, especially for a breed of animal who typically moves and sniffs as though its being electrically prodded from behind for even a moment of pause. She’s smart: smart enough to have outsmarted the typical hamster proofed roof of her cage as well as the lid to her ball. Her only fault, really, is the noise she makes at night; hamsters are, of course, nocturnal creatures, and she has a string of nightly exploits that include chewing on parts of her cage, running at a higher speed limit than her wheel is built to contend with, and generally moving things around in a rather noisy fashion.
I can admit that i was jealous of her, especially seeing as at the time i was the only housemate who didn’t own a pet. So, when Elise decided to take a day off for comparative snake-shopping, i half-heartedly began examining hamsters as we progressed from store to store. None of them were cute enough for me until our last store, hit upon as a bit of a lark, where after giving up on a rodent so belligerent that she couldn’t be picked up by an employee to a tiny scurrying doll that – after some contention – has become my pet hamster Stoli.
At night she has taken to gnawing on the tiny evergreen bars of the front hatch to her cage to fulfill her requisite noisemaking quota, and although it’s probably some animal escape-instinct at work on her part to me it is just the evil clicking-of-death at 4am. And 5am. Though, sometimes as early as 2:30am. I’ve learned that the only way to avoid these untimely wake-up calls is to engage her attention before i go to bed; i let her crawl around on my desk while i’m catching up on the day’s news, and then i find a nice clear surface for her to really run off some stream on before i head to bed. Tonight i took her out into my entirely bare sitting room and watched – bemused – as she careful sniffed across the entire space one square-hamster at a time. It seems to have worked, as she’s gone from recklessly leaping off the side of my chair three consecutive times thirty minutes ago to sitting quietly on the floor of her cage contemplating the hatch as i type.
Or maybe that has to do with the extra-whitening toothpaste i spread all over the front bars of her cage, the touching of which usually sends her scurrying back to her hidey-hole to wipe her hands off on stale food and cedar chips.
So, if you’ve been wondering why i haven’t been blogging all week despite having my classic AM timespot uncharacteristically freed up, now you know: i’ve been trying to wear out my hamster.
You sit down and promise to write all this week and then you get distracted by food and television and work and sleep and suddenly it’s friday and you’ve got one post to show for all of your trouble and you already forget everything you had meant to say this week other than “i’m tired” or “i’m bored” so you just head back to work for another few hours until you can go home.
The primary reason that malls bother me is that i don’t think so much pop culture and watered down fashion should exist and commingle in one place. I cannot bare to look at another Lord of the Rings cross-promotion. I cannot watch my girlfriend try on jeans every fifty feet for three hours anywhere but a mall. I almost cannot stand the ability to comparison shop for video games, Magic cards, stretch jeans, and Pat Benatar cds all at once.anywhere but a mall.
New Jersey, for those of you not in the know, has almost reached mall saturation-point. Really. And, when Elise asked me if i wanted to go shopping today, i had no idea that it would be a multiple store, multiple mall, multiple highway endeavor. NJ needs its malls, because they represent a commercially and spatially sound means of starting up a highly visited business venture in a state that all but refrains from imitating the metro Philadelphia and New York settings that it exists as a suburb to. However, i don’t think that i need them.
There is something distasteful about obviously thirteen year old girls in tube tops and capri pants with little wicker purses trying to catch peoples eye. There is something gut-wrenching about the Disney characters pressed onto black cotton shirts in startling standard alternative store Hot Topic, whose should-be motto was on sale as a witty Tee. Express is hedging their bets heavily on pin stripes and retro-hemmed skirts, while Wet Seal is leading the pack of outlets selling peasant-style blouses in ridiculously busy prints. Aeropostale seems to be convinced that terrycloth, baby animals, and sparkles are the undeniable keys to fashion success – and are willing to offer you an obscenely cheap PDA with your $50 purchase to prove it. And don’t even get me started on how hard i laughed when i looked inside the store that was (nearly fictionally) titled Rave Girl, or about the swimsuit at the Macy’s entrance that appeared to be depicting a 9/11 memorial somewhere just above the crotch.
It’s not that the existence of malls bothers me so much as the ways in which people rely and depend on them. At a time when everything from the songs you hear on the radio to the fashions you see on campus are dictated just as much by brute force marketing as by public opinion, how can a mall be anything other than a virtual cesspool of what corporate America thinks you should buy? Of course they only have a handful of independent albums, of course their size six jeans wouldn’t have ever fit me in my anorexic heyday, and of course the price of Neverwinter Nights is nearly the same at every store we visit. It is not a coincidence, it is a calculation, and every striped polo shirt that you buy means that everything added up just as planned.
If my Communications degree means anything to me, it is the ability to see through corporate curtains to the strings being pulled, even if it also means Elise might never take me shopping again.