chaucer, of course, is held in the windowless basement room in miller, a room which surely only exists so that someone can have a little laugh as they assign chaucer to it. karen, hip as she is, promptly requests a new room, and we are moved to howard, to a room facing plants and light. this does not change the fact, however, that the canterbury tales are in middle english, and that karen has a habit of randomly selecting students to read excerpts aloud.
poetry writing is held in a quite small room on the third floor of miller, a floor populated mainly by professors' offices. we sit at a table which is actually multiple tables forced into a rectangle. jerry saunters in with a bottle of smart water in hand and says, "i need all the help i can get." we will write poems, read poems from an american 2005 anthology, and write free-form "journals" in which we halfheartedly analyze poems from the anthology and/or spill our souls about struggles with our own poems. there will be no tests.
communication and gender impresses me, as it is far more focused on gender than on communication. we begin by reading essays and chapters from books, none of which are complete snores. every night before class, i log on to the moodle and write a one-paragraph response to the required question. one night, drinking with madeline, i find myself drunk, and write my moodle response, feeling a great sense of accomplishment. drunk and doing homework, wasn't that supposed to happen two years ago? reading it the next day, i'm amazed by my own coherency.
//
everyone is gone. marie in russia, randall in the dominican republic, karen in france. to my great surprise, delphine shows interest in me. i'm apprehensive. we meet at maggie's for a brief while to begin with. maggie's vanilla latte is far too sweet, but delphine is more talkative and less reserved than i thought.
delphine and her serious boyfriend broke up, and i quickly learn she is on a quest to forget him. this quest involves venturing into portland a lot. busying herself. so i take her to value village on 82nd, play speed with her, and we go out to dessert at pix patisserie, where i try a "real hazelnut" latte. though i try to stir it in, the thick hazelnut cream sticks to the bottom of my mug.
//
all semester i will blog on the lc website again. we have an initial blogging meeting, with pizza, and they ask me if i have any tips for the new bloggers. being put on the spot, i am cynical, and tell them they will run out of things to say, eventually. then again, my life is usually not very eventful.
one of the people in charge mentions that entries can be spiced up in various ways -- like the espresso tour i did. at this, a couple freshmen perk up and say, "that was you? i read your blog!"
they try to give me a camera. the camera is 3.2 megapixels, certainly nothing special, and what do i need another camera like that for? i'm told i can be rewarded with gift cards instead.
//
i need a new fucking credit union. the nearest onpoint is in NE, and asian woman teller has no idea what to tell me when i ask which number i should use to order checks with. considering i have already ordered three boxes of checks using what i thought was my account number, then used one to pay half the rent, and it bounced, and we got a threatening letter from capital telling us we'd be evicted if it happened again, i am more than irritated.
so i get home, call the credit union hoping for a more intelligent employee, and ask again about the number. "you have to go into one of our branch locations to get that," the guy tells me.
this is fucking ridiculous. i order a vibrator, a cute little blue thing that i find i can actually insert into my vagina without much difficulty. success somewhere.
//
alex and i go out to breakfast at the cup & saucer on hawthorne. my vanilla latte is delicious, albeit very sweet. my pancakes are average and unsurprising. two men are seated at a two-person table next to us, and the entire time, only speak a couple words to each other. even while eating.
afterward, laughing down hawthorne, alex and i try to think of relationship scenarios in which not speaking at all would not be unusual.
//
out of nowhere, alex's dad offers to put a 250 gig hard drive in my desktop computer. we run into a few dilemmas along the way, one which requires a trip to a computer store on 82nd for an extra part. during the process of putting the hard drive in, curt turns to me and says, "i have a serious question for you. how often do you use your floppy drive?" he puts the new hard drive in that slot.
curt and laurie love tessa. it is hard for them to fathom a cat that enjoys being touched.
we go out to lunch at pastini. everyone has alcohol but me. curt murmurs to alex, "the waitress looks like someone you know."
who?
"robert smith."
//
i learn some valuable lessons from living in an apartment, like that making a 13x9 of scalloped potatoes takes a million years.
as tessa becomes more comfortable with the apartment, we find her sprawled everywhere. we buy her a refillable catnip toy and she goes loca over it.
//
school goes on as usual. quickly i slide into the everyday ebb and flow, with very few glitches. waking up at 8:45 does not, yet, feel murderous. perhaps it's the comfort of having an apartment -- my own bathroom, kitchen, living room to exist in before jetting off to school.
classes don't kill me. surprisingly, chaucer doesn't kill me. secretly, i think i may be learning middle english. i may be understanding how to read it properly. in my head, as i type the word "night," i pronounce it nee-kt. for no reason at all.
poetry is not especially good. i don't agree with jerry's technique for determining when people will write poems, and when those poems will be discussed. we volunteer to turn in poems on specific days, then jerry shuffles the papers and picks out poems one at a time to be discussed. consequently, the poems i write that i want critiqued don't get critiqued, and those that i want to forget i ever wrote are offered up for critique.
comm and gender is the least difficult of all. i bring coffee to class religiously, and i drink it during the entire period. the people in the class are more communications people than gender people, but it makes it more interesting for me. sometimes our professor, daena, thinks we need to toss a plush football around the room to incite discussion; sometimes we pick numbers out of a bag and answer numbered questions written on the whiteboard. my favorite days are the ones in which she speaks and we write. she is very focused on summarizing the readings, so much that i already feel i have memorized every author's viewpoint. we begin with the female deficit perspective, move on to the different cultures theory.
daena wants a commitment about the final project, the 25-page paper and corresponding presentation. after receiving a discouraging email from her urging me to work in a group, i feebly try nudging into a few groups which have already formed without me. none of them have openings. i want to go this one alone. i sign up by myself, then collect books and sit around with delphine in a study room until i come up with an idea. i will watch porn and measure degradation. i will come up with a way to justify using good porn, then i will prove that not all porn is degrading toward women. i write up my proposal.
delphine seems uncomfortable with the idea of porn, but too bad. she's had sex.
//
on september 28, we gather in gresham for a "birthday" dinner. somehow this is supposed to cover both kyle's and my birthdays... 1-2 months early. papa slips me $100, but other than that, it's just a dinner. "bun-length" hot dogs, salad, and delicious corn on the cob, with apple crisp for dessert. carter sucks whipped cream out of the can mercilessly. kyle and lisa tell everyone their plan to get a purebred persian for $250. why does it have to be purebred? no reason, they just want a "smashed face cat."
in other news, my mom gives me her old electric mixer, papa tries to pawn off a huge box of towels he stole from the pool area of wherever he just vacationed to, and aunt sandy is still brainwashed about internet explorer.
and my bedroom has magically split into two rooms �- one (the bigger one) for dad to build pedalboards in, the other a guestroom with my old bed wearing nana's old bedspread.
//
for a night, madeline and i drive to corvallis to see ang and go to a "pure romance" party. pure romance parties are basically tame sex toy parties (for women only, of course!) led by middle-aged women wanting to spice up their source of income. ang is in it for the free toys and the benefits from being the host of the party. we're in it for the laughs, and to visit ang.
the party is hilarious. the middle-aged woman seems surprised at our age. ang dresses up like a total slut just to see what the woman will do. she doesn't do anything, just plays a verbal version of dirty minds with us before everyone arrives. i rule at it.
this is all held in a recreation room in the apartment complexes ang lives in. we arrange the chairs in a circle. the woman gives us penis-shaped pencil toppers (because we're all straight here, right?!) and tries to hype us up about lotions and edible lubes by telling us they taste so good she would frost a cake with them. then she moves on to more risque items, like massive rabbit vibrators and a few smaller vibrators. nothing really catches my eye, and i know i can get any of the vibrators online anyway, for cheaper. so i don't order anything. madeline orders an egg vibrator to replace her broken one, and i advise ang on which vibrators to order for herself.
the middle-aged woman sets her things up in the bathroom, the only other room, so that there can be a "private" ordering area. because people are soooo embarrassed about ordering sexy items. embarrassed because we tell them to be.
afterward, people dissipate quickly. ang, who had invited everyone over to her apartment afterward for a party, is annoyed with them for leaving, mostly because they're all going to other parties.
so it's just ang, me, madeline, and three other chicks in ang's living room. i drink mike's hard lime that i brought, and ang brings out nipple/clit stimulation gel for us to try, raving about it. we all stick our hands down our shirts, but it doesn't do anything for me. after the mike's, i drink some peppermint schnapps that ang offers me. get pleasantly drunk and converse with everyone for hours, about college and high school, gripes and stories. then we sleep on the floor in ang's living room.
//
i notice that on edenfantasys.com, they are looking for sex toy reviewers. send them a writing sample and you'll be considered. i want free vibrators, so i write up a review of my blue plastic vibrator and send it to them. quickly, i'm accepted, and they ship my first toy: an oddly-shaped rabbit vibrator made of blue TPR silicone with pink stripes. i must come up with a name, so i decide on epiphora. the "repetition of a word or phrase at the end of several clauses."