Alexander & the Women

1. & 2.

She was a teacher who brought American students to Europe, where she acted as their instructor and tour guide. She spoke English nearly flawlessly with a slight but noticeable accent. We met each other one morning in a Northern European city I was visiting during a school holiday, and we ended up spending that entire day together. She offered to let me stay in the flat she was renting, and I accepted. We were both free and unengaged, and we spent our days walking down the cold streets with our coats buttoned up, stopping off in the cafes for a smoke or visiting little shops and boutiques. The city was a famous one—historic and drab, with a language something like English.

She was rich—her father was a shrewd businessman, wealthy even by her country’s standards—and she had all the impetuous, flighty selfishness her security afforded her. And yet I never tired of her, and even now I grow lonesome when I remember her clipped, uneven gait, as if she were lugging some invisible burden. We discussed books and films and played slow games of chess, and the days slid into nights.

One of the last nights before I was due to leave the city we went walking together along a narrow canal. She was wearing a coarsely textured greenish coat that went down to her knees. We moved swiftly through the cold air, past the glitter of lights reflecting off slow-moving water. I knew we probably wouldn’t see each other again for a long time (if ever), though we had agreed to keep in touch. She had vague plans to visit the some of the major cities in the United States sometime in next couple years. She stopped off in front of a building, walked up a set of stairs, and disappeared.

I knew I should have followed her, but I didn’t, and she didn’t come back out to look for me. I stood facing away from the building, watching the patches of light as they broke against the canal’s greasy surface. Across the way, framed by a window, I saw the shape of a woman. Her room was dimly lit, but I could make out her silhouette, and I saw that she wasn’t wearing a blouse, just a brassiere. She sat in a chair, gazing out her window. She didn’t see me, and I watched her with my hands balled in my coat pocket, not wanting her to see me. I didn’t go over to her—better her than my erstwhile companion—I just watched, feeling colder and colder, chilled to the core by the wind blowing through the streets of that sad, ugly city.

3.

She gave me a parting gift—an undershirt that belonged to her husband, with whom I was acquainted. I understood perfectly well that she and I would probably never see each other again, though neither of us said so explicitly.

Soon I would be gone, and all I would have of her would be the undershirt, a single photograph I had taken, and a couple items I had stolen from her while she slept. I keep those items on a bookshelf now and rarely look at them. Sometimes I’m tempted to just throw them out. I can’t bring myself to look at the photograph, either—I’m too ashamed. I was wrong to have taken it.

4.

The building had scaffolding veiling its entire facade. The framework was made of green metal pipes bolted to each other at right and 45 degree angles, with a wooden platform on the second floor. I was dressed from head to toe in black—a black button-down, cheap black slacks, black leather shoes with the heels worn down at an angle. Though it was past midnight, people were still walking on the sidewalks, and I loitered until I was sure that my climbing the scaffolding would attract the minimum possible attention.

I pulled myself up and up and weaseled through a small gap between the platform and the building. I hauled myself onto a dirty ledge. It was suddenly dark—the street was lit under the scaffolding, but not above it. I clapped my hands and picked my way across the platform to one of the glossy black fire escapes. I walked up the steps and crouched by a third floor window. Through the window, a woman was sitting on a gray sofa. She had just taken a shower—her hair was wet and she was wearing a towel wrapped up, in the feminine way, under her armpits. She didn’t notice me—I didn’t want her to just yet. I watched her, planning my next move. I knew she was alone in the apartment: she lived with a man, but he wasn’t home now. I waited a moment longer, reached out, and touched the glass.

4.8 Alexander Enters the Black Lodge

1. The Green Bed

I find myself alone in a bedroom with an enormous green bed. I can’t remember ever seeing a bed so large. Downstairs I hear voices. I climb out of the bed and ease onto the floor. I am wearing chinos in a muddy blue color. Underneath the bed I see shoes. Slowly I crawl toward an open window and pull up the venetian blinds, but the cords are uneven and one side pinches, leaving the blinds in a fan-bunting arc. The light is sharp, and for the first time in months I feel the warm, radiant heat of the sun. But it was an illusion—the bed, the shoes, the floor, the pants, and the sun’s heat. What I was actually feeling was the sizzling warmth of a baseboard heater. And there weren’t any voices downstairs at all.

2. The Kingdom of Heaven

Two women are sitting across from me on a green sofa. One asks me to describe the Kingdom of Heaven to her. And I tell them—yes—it is something like a forest—a verdant wood, vaguely Korean, vaguely North European. The sinful are punished with limited mobility. The truly awful are uncomfortably frozen forever in place, while the righteous have free access to any part of the Kingdom of Heaven they wish. But, of course, they are inclined to stay in the nicer parts and avoid slumming around the frozen. But some of the righteous, maybe the most restless of them, wander around, speaking with the damned and collecting their stories.

3. The Yellow Kitchen

I am ironing a pale yellow shirt in the kitchen when a woman walks into my house. I am so startled I gasp. She brings a chair into the kitchen and begins smoking thin cigarettes with the door open. I am boiling water on a stove. I am cooking spaghetti. Distracted, I leave the iron on my shirt when I go check on the spaghetti. She smokes her cigarettes. I pour thin streams of water onto my shirt from a mug. I can smell the steam and smoke.

Sometimes, and just for a moment (a moment!), time seems to collapse. The past, present, and future telescope into one entity, all existing at once, and I am aware very vividly that I am alive and dead at the same time, like the opera singer in the ruins of Pompeii. Once it happened when I was walking up a set of stairs in Basel with an American friend. Once it happened when I was standing in a yellow kitchen, eating a meal while leaning against a counter and facing the refrigerator.

4.7 The Top Hat: A Parable (Alexander Decides to Leave Boston)

1.

There was a fox that lived on the edge of a dark wood where the brush was so thick that burrowing animals lived in it, one above the other, without the least inconvenience. The fox lived within sight of a tailor’s cottage, and every afternoon the tailor’s wife baked savory meat pies with slit tops and left them on the forest-facing sill to cool. The fox, who was very lean and very greedy, spent many evenings sitting on a tree stump, staring at the pies and trying to concoct a plan to snatch them down and gobble them up himself.

The tailor had three sons, all of them as fat and pink as pigs and each one stupider than the next. The tailor was so prosperous that his sons could spend their days idle. They passed many hours in torpor, staring out the window, where they often saw the fox staring right back. They soon contrived to make the fox their special pet. They brought him scraps of meat and greasy bread and bullied him into learning simple tricks. The fox became quite adept at turning somersaults, and whenever he saw the tailor’s sons through a window he would turn a somersault and wait for them to throw him a tip of sausage or a crust of cheese. Another trick he learned that delighted them particularly was standing upright and walking like a man.

One day, when the tailor was out performing a fitting in town and his wife was at market, the sons became careless and invited the fox into their father’s home. They played at the fox’s being their fourth brother, and made a cap for him out of a dishrag and a cloak out of an old checked tablecloth. They held the fox over a basin of water, that he could see his own reflection, and indeed with his pointed ears covered up he looked very much like a man.

The tailor was one of the most skilled in the land, and his clientele included many of the courtiers and ministers of the Capital, if not the princes themselves. The tailor himself was a humble man and chose for the time being to continue to work at his old cottage, even as such an arrangement became more and more inconvenient. He dreaded the inevitable day he would have to open a shop in the Capital. The tailor’s sons, however, were very prideful, and they led the fox into their father’s musty workroom, which was stacked chin-height with finery of all kinds—topcoats, top hats, fine wool slacks, shirts of Egyptian cotton, and satin vests. The sons puffed out their chests, making themselves even larger than usual, and asked the fox if he was impressed. In truth he was.

Being clever, the fox shed his dishrag hat and tablecloth cloak and stood nuzzling the clothing. The sons, seeing now a new game to play, grabbed hold of the fox and dressed him in the most well-made, stylish outfit in their father’s workroom. They brought the fox their mother’s looking glass so he could admire himself. The fox looked quite handsome in his new clothing, and when the sons had their backs turned he slipped out through a window.

2.

Soon the fox was renting an opulently appointed if small room overlooking a pleasure garden on the river that ran through the Capital. During the day he would do sums at his desk—a simple occupation that made him very wealthy. At night he would watch the fireworks displays over the palace, which was visible from his window. In idle hours he studied the habits and manners of humans, either by watching passers-by through his window or by reading books. Sometimes he would take long walks around the city, past the tidy alleys, bright shops, majestic spires, and expansive squares with their brass statues. Always he wore his top hat, even when he was sitting at a meal. If any human saw his pointed ears, they would realize his true nature and expel him.

While he enjoyed the pleasures of the Capital, he was in many ways not entirely content. He often thought about his home in the woods, particularly his dear friends, a wild boar and a brown bear whom he would never see again. Never again would they entrap a family of hares together and devour them whole while sunning themselves. Furthermore, after coming to the city he developed certain symptoms. His vision would go bleary for no reason he could discern, and he had a constant metallic taste in his mouth. So as not to offend others, he took to chewing parsley. He was often dizzy, and would spend entire days in bed.

3.

One of his lovers was named Isabel. She was the daughter of an industrialist. She had long brown ringlets and a fair, round face. She was the very picture of elegance during daylight, but once night fell she would become sentimental, and in a certain way he despised her. She would beg him to take off his top-hat, so that she could run her fingers through his hair when they made love, but he would rebuff these requests quite brutally. Something about the possibility thrilled him, however, and he had a secret wish that one day she would snatch the hat off, so as to assuage for a moment the anger and contempt that he had felt so unshakably since his move to the Capital.

Once, as they walked together after church through a park, he had a very strong spell of nausea and had to sit for several minutes on a stone bench to collect himself. Isabel sat beside him and caressed him, asking him what was the trouble. He told her of the symptoms he had developed since his move to the city—the dizziness, the metallic taste, and the bouts of confusion. She nodded as if she understood.

That evening she presented him with a tonic that she said would cure his symptoms, which according to her were the result of an affliction relatively common to foreigners living in the Capital. He took the tonic from her, but when she left the room he dumped it out of a window.

4.

He saw before him the wall surrounding the Capital. Each door he opened led to a hall and more doors at the end of the halls. The walls were covered in dingy brown tapestries, and the light was so dim that he could not make out the figures depicted. These tapestries muffled his footfalls, and through them he heard what sounded like whispers. The fox walked on all fours, like a beast. He was clumsy after so much time upright, but he knew that he must practice, as once he returned to his wood he would have to walk on all fours again and forevermore. But he never did return to the wood: after what seemed to be hours, he opened a door and found himself stepping into sunlight. He was still in the Capital, except now on the west side, closer to the Opera House.

5.

The fox sat at a cabaret with Isabel and he spied a gentleman and a lady sitting at the bar. The man was wearing a top hat, even as he was sitting, and his companion had her hair in an intricate, slightly outmoded style that hid her ears. Isabel had been smearing pâté on a hunk of bread and talking about the city’s mayor, who had again made a spectacle of himself at a ball the night before. She stopped talking and followed the fox’s line of vision. He stood resolutely. Isabel touched his coat and said, “You must not speak to them.”

The fox walked toward the bar and, bowing, introduced himself to the couple. The woman became interested in her drink, at which she stared quite impassively. The man cleared his throat and did not meet the fox’s eye. The fox asked them if they were foreign to the country. The woman said, “Please, don’t bother us, and don’t make trouble for us,” so the fox withdrew and returned to his table.

He sat, morose, remembering his old friend the boar, with whom he had as a kit gone on campaigns searching for a legendary crevasse in the heart of the woods. Even if he could quit the Capital, he would never be able to face the boar again. He thought also about his mother, whom a hunter had killed when the fox was very young and of whom he had few memories. Isabel was talking as if to someone behind her: “Please know there is nothing you could tell me that would change my love for you.”

The fox felt as if he were one of the balloons given to children on festival days and that he had just been released, floating upward and away.

6.

Once it happened, as if in a dream, that he saw the tailor’s sons in the Capital. They had grown by now into strapping men, walking with their bellies puffed out wearing fancy cummerbunds, each son’s a different color. They were cramming themselves into a carriage as the fox walked by. The fox pulled his top hat, which he still wore constantly, over his eyes so they would not recognize him as he kept pace behind. The carriage clattered slowly up and down the streets and finally stopped in front of the palace. The sons squeezed out and walked three abreast toward the gilt gates of the palace, where a dozen guards wearing plumed caps stood at attention.

The fox made to follow them, but then he spied a hole in the ground with a staircase leading down into it, as if into a basement with earthen walls. But the staircase led down as far as the fox could see, never reaching a room. Very slowly the fox walked down into the ground, watching the palace as he did so. The palace seemed to grow taller and taller, and the people around him appeared more and more monstrous, and the fox walked toward the whispers, down, down, down, until he was in complete darkness, and the walls became more narrow and the ceiling lower. He could feel the heat of the earth, and he could hear no longer the noises of the city, just the soft scratches of the insects of the ground and the thudding of his own small heart.

4.6 Alexander Visits Texas

1.

Once I was staying at a motel somewhere in Texas (even then I didn’t know the town’s name) and I woke up with a man standing at the foot of my bed, telling me that the police might be coming but I didn’t need to worry about it. When the police come I should just be cool. Scant specifics were provided, and I was too exhausted and grumpy to ask for clarification. After a short vague panic I resigned myself to whatever fate I would meet and put a pillow over my head so he wouldn’t bother me anymore. That was years ago.

2. 

My phone rings and I wander into a bedroom. Maria-Elisa seems upset and isn’t making very much sense. She says the police might be there when I come back.

3.

The perpetrator is crouched on the stoop, peering through the window and shouting something like, “Give me the fucking key” when I roll up with Mithun. I get out and mosey past like I’m on my way elsewhere. When I’m out of sight of the man, Mithun pulls up next to me and rolls down the window. I look over my shoulder and saunter to the window, resting my elbows on the edge. He offers to drive around with me a bit until the coast is clear. I decline.

Maria-Elisa cracks open the side door and I slip in before she slams it shut and pulls the bolt. She shoves me into her bedroom, closing the door behind us. I’m juggling two six packs. She’s like, “Hide that shit.” I stuff one into a hamper and cover it with a sweatshirt. I push the other one behind the hamper, partially under a nightstand or cabinet.

4.

Basically out of nowhere, the woman looks me in the eye and says, “Your friend is very handsome.” She’s referring to me. She’s sitting on an armchair upholstered in a reddish tapestry depicting unicorns. I’m slouching on a loveseat across from her, wearing a teal nylon taffeta windbreaker I bought at Brooklyn Flea for $3. The appropriate response to compliments of that kind from strangers is “Thank you,” which is what I say. “He’s really handsome,” she says, still staring me in the eye. I’m like, “Gosh, thanks.” She says, “You’re really handsome. Look at you. You’re really cute.” I laugh and say, “Wow, thanks.” I don’t look at her eight-year-old. I basically don’t look at anyone.

Apparently she tried the same tack with Chris a few months back, when Maria was standing right there. For Maria, that had been the last straw.

5.

The woman wanders into another room as if lost in thought. There is a half-full beer on a table that has cartoony art (including a winking Sailor Moon) drawn on it in with magic marker. She regards the beer, picks it up, and slurps it down in three gulps, as if she were at a bar and all her friends were getting up to leave.

Her husband has stopped hollering by now, but we’re keeping the house in lock-down until the police arrive. I nurse fantasies of a sudden panic as he smashes a window.

6.

Maria-Elisa has a small pink device that looks something like a computer charger. It has a node you stick to an object, and that object becomes a resonant speaker. We got the coffee table to play KTRU. “Isn’t that cool!” she says. “You could stick it to anything!” She hands it to the kid, who is obviously charmed in an oblique, lackluster way. The entire night, this is the closest I see him to being pleased. He reminds me of a student cautiously enjoying a classroom demonstration. He tries to stick the node to a beer bottle cap, but that doesn’t work very well. Maria hands him something, possibly a lamp.

The other experiment we have is a tall hexagonal glass that Maria-Elisa fills with a mixture of milk and dish soap. The idea is that drops of food coloring will swirl, which they do. We affix the speaker to the glass and turn on some bass-heavy music, but the vibration doesn’t have a substantial effect on the green drops of food coloring, which fan out a bit and stop.

The mother has collapsed on an armchair and is swinging from defiant to maudlin and back, over and over and over. Just as the kid is about to get distracted, she starts up again. “It’s my fucking house!” she mutters. “I’m going. I’m going. It’s my fucking house! I gotta go.” She’ll lean forward and brace her hands on the chair’s arms. Then we’d have to talk her out of it. “I really just don’t think that’s a very good idea. Come on, the police should be here any minute. Hey, what if we stick it to a pot!”

7.

Maria and Chris start singing “Happy Birthday,” but neither really commits. I join in sheepishly toward the end, so ashamed I could melt. It falls completely flat. Maria saves the day by breaking into a rousing joke. “You look like a gorilla and smell like one too!” Both the kid and the mother think this is funny—the woman starts to reminisce in very vague terms.

The police finally arrive, two or so hours after the first call was placed. A lady cop asks questions and points the flashlight beam at the woman’s face. The woman is plastered and not making much sense. The cop directs questions to the child, who is standing next to his mother in the doorway. We discover that it’s not the kid’s actual birthday. His family celebrates it in January because on the date of his actual birthday his father left them. It’s also up to him to describe the dispute: the husband bullied and shoved his wife outside and pushed her into a car; she knocked her head on the bumper.

The cop tells the woman to stay in the house and lock the doors. There is no sign of the husband outside: the police will search. The woman goes out anyway, and the lady cop shouts at her to go back inside and lock the door. When the door is closed, the woman calls the cop a bitch.

Later, Maria is livid. Apparently this is a thing: when the police arrive for a domestic disturbance call and find a drunk victim, they are much less accommodating. “I told her! I told her! Why’d we let her have that goddamn beer?”

8.

The entire night is spent negotiating the line between bearing witness and exploitative voyeurism (a line you might be negotiating now, as you read this). I’m taking mental notes constantly; this might make it in the novel. I spend a couple hours practicing a low-affect, dead-eyed, non-agentive bearing.

9.

The kid goes berserk and shoves his mother into a table. She is so drunk by now as to be totally useless. He’s screaming things like, “Mama, you’re drunk,” and “Do you WANT him to hurt you?!” We’re like, “What the fuck,” but don’t intervene. He keeps pushing her, bracing himself at an angle and keeping his head low. He doesn’t mean to knock her over, just to keep her away from the door. She’s sloppy and stumbles, jostling the beer bottles and almost knocking them over, but not quite. The kid is hysterical. Maria and I walk into another room.

10.

She’s finally passed out on the sofa. The kid, who is awake, cuddles with her. We’re outside smoking and standing with our weight on one leg. A Technicolor, life-sized papier-mâché monstrosity called “Hair Fantasy” is leaning against the side stoop. It was brought home from an art installation. I had run out to meet Mark when he rolled up, intending to explain the situation to him (which I did). As we stand around by Hair Fantasy, he imitates me to comic effect: catching his breath as if he is about to begin talking, then staring into middle space, then catching his breath as if he is about to begin talking, then staring into middle space, maybe five times in quick succession.

11.

At long last the woman’s sister rolls up on a three-wheel bicycle. She shakes the woman awake and bullies her quite viciously before sending her home. The sister takes the kid to spend the night at her place.

Rid of them, we booze until past 3am. This has been all told a two to three hour ordeal. I fall asleep on the couch, wearing my lumberjack PJs that were a gift from a friend’s mother. It’s still dark when a knock on the door wakes me. I’m naked from the waist up, so I pull my windbreaker on and zip it up to the clavicle. The woman is standing outside and seems sober. “Is my son in there?” I gather my mental energies and say, very slowly, “He was taken by your sister last night and is staying with her.” She thanks me and walks away. I bolt the door and shed the jacket, careful not to knock against the table as I shuffle around my luggage to the sofa.

The next morning I wake up at 8 or 8:30 and can’t get back to sleep. I empty beer bottles into the sink four at a time and put the empties into a brown grocery bag for recycling. I do some of the dishes as well.

12.

That night, Maria and I are in an apartment by Rice, visiting with an old friend and some of her friends. We basically tell the whole story to three people, who are all sitting on a sofa across from us. When we are finished, one of the listeners takes a poll: what ethnicity or, like, race did they think this woman was? The way Maria and I had told it, it had been ambiguous. He points to his friend.

“I was thinking Hispanic.”

“White.”

“Okay, see, I thought she was black. So which was it?”

Maria gives a clever answer, and everybody laughs. We go play Settlers of Catan, and my team wins.

13.

The next night J_____ is over. She tells us about a composition written by a Rice professor (“like the whitest guy ever”) that she once had to perform. The first movement was called “Prayer,” or something. The second was called “Holocaust.” The last was called “Klezmer,” and at the very end all the musicians were supposed to clap their hands and say, in unison, “Opa” or some equally Eastern-European-sounding exclamation (I can’t for the life of me remember what the exact word was).

“I literally almost walked out,” she said, looking over her shoulder. “I was so pissed.”

4.5 Alexander Briefly Visits Alabama (2)

I. WANDERER

I come above ground and hail a cab. The cabbie keeps assuring me I’ll probably be fine until I tell him my actual flight time. Then he keeps apologizing for not running red lights. It becomes embarrassing. I overtip him and miss my flight.

The travel day ends up lasting 12 hours, divided between Boston, DFW, and finally Mobile. I do about 200 mathematical problem solving GMAT questions in a workbook. Completing the math section of standardized tests is what God put me on this earth to do. I use a thick black porous-point pen and score better than the book’s previous owner, God bless her.

My brother picks me up and we drive to a Waffle House. I order a waffle and some hash browns. At one point a young woman sitting at another booth turns around and says something like, “I’m sure everything will all work out.” She is earnest but seems unhinged, which explains her breathless attempt to reach out to us. At any rate, her sentiments are not welcome, and we let her know. This is the first time I’ve been in Alabama in a year and a half.

II. SWEATER PARTY

When I’m meeting old friends I haven’t kept in touch with very well, I always brace myself for the possibility that they despise me now. Partially I worry that in hindsight they will realize how awful I really am. Partially I worry that I might be a hateful reminder of their own fundamental isolation and mortality. Partially I worry that some sort of fox and the hound shit has gone down and we have to hate each other now, and I just haven’t realized it yet. Partially I’m misinterpreting their inevitably diminished interest in me as hostile. Partially I am projecting my own egotistical insecurities, in a warped form, onto those around me. What other reasons can you think of for this reaction? Leave a comment or tweet your responses to @acromp with hashtag #whoevencares. CLICK HERE TO READ MORE >>>

III. SOMETIMES EVEN NOW WHEN I’M FEELING LONELY AND BEAT

Apparently once in biology class I waltzed around with an embalmed cat singing “What’s New, Pussycat.”

IV. AMERICA

I sit on a couch and eat a homemade ice cream cookie. On the television is a game show. Contestants who are unable to provide the correct answer are dropped through a trap door.

V. THE LAST DIVINE PRINCIPLE LESSON: THE STORY OF A LITTLE HALF-ALSATIAN

I swing into the now-vacant lot and get out of the car and walk to a back corner. The ground is weedy and there is no sign of the old buildings, not even the foundation. Just as I remember, the chainlink fence at the back has flimsy pink and white slats threaded through it at the diagonal. It divides the property from the woods. The lot seems small for how large I remember Headquarters being. An abandoned trailer used to be in the woods behind the property. As a child I went one Sunday to explore. The floor of this trailer was covered in cheap broken toys in a way that still makes me think of the doll on the cover of Stephen King’s Desperation. I would go now to see if the trailer is still there, but I don’t have the heart to. I get back into the car and drive as far south as I can go without dropping into the sea.

Literally, to Dauphin Island.

More Selected Search Terms

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4.4 Alexander Goes Out on Friday Night and Comes Home on Saturday Morning

I.

A woman is fussing with her daughter’s jacket. The daughter is in hysterics because an enormous turkey is menacing her. The turkey is so fat it has a belabored walk. Its feathers are a bright, cool white. It belabors toward her, probably hoping she will feed it. The girl screams, It’s coming to get me. I assume the bird is not a heritage–that is, I assume that though it is allowed to walk free and accept feed from autumn visitors to the farm, and that its fat ass will grow old and die of natural causes, it comes from a stock bred to become unsustainably meaty as quickly as possible before being beheaded. I want to touch it, but it might have turkey fleas or other parasites.

My grandmother used to keep chickens by the garden. She got rid of them a few years ago, after the avian flu scare. It’s just as well. Though I enjoyed feeding them grass, they were malicious, hateful creatures.

II.

The next morning, a woman with her face pressed against a gate of wrought iron bars begins hollering “We Shall Overcome.” She seems to be offering support to the clutch of tents in the middle of Harvard Yard, but they are so far away it is doubtful that any of the students notice. Since the Occupy Harvard students set up shop, the campus has gone into lockdown: every individual entering Harvard’s main campus has to present Harvard ID, no exceptions. All but a handful of entrances are locked, and police officers are stationed at every opening. Apparently fench-jumpers have been arrested. Professors are livid. I assume this woman is not part of the Harvard community, or she probably would have gone into Harvard Yard to talk to protesters herself. But for all I know this undignified spectacle might be the point. Perhaps whether or not the students heard her is incidental.

I am walking to the train station. I have to go home, pick up the jacket I’m mailing back to Sara, and run to the post office before it closes at 1pm. I am wearing a peacoat. Strangers on the street have complimented this peacoat, though I don’t think it’s anything special.

III.

I sit at a small square table and  pick at a coffee cake muffintop. A sad sack walks toward me. It occurs to me that now I’m able to tell at a glance whether a pair of men’s jeans is cheap or expensive. The fit in the thigh, the appearance of the material, and the way the fabric falls at the knee are taken into account.

IV.

In Genesis, which is the first book of the Old Testament, Adam and Eve are driven from the paradisiacal Garden of Eden after a serpent tricks them into eating of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. It’s generally accepted that this lapse, be it metaphorical or historical, was erotic. I personally think such a reading is reductive and, finally, damaging.

V.

There’s a French adjective that means something like “predisposed to secretiveness for its own sake.” The word carries a value judgment: the idea is that the secrets are petty, and the pleasure taken from nursing them is a mean, contemptible one. I came across the word once but can’t remember it.

4.3 Time Moves Forward

NATURAL DISASTERS

I was sitting in S███’s office when the shaking started, and  S███ was eating lunch in the kitchen. We discussed what it could be: not, it became clear, the neighbors walking up the stairs. A crane across the way might have been the culprit, except there is no reason for a crane to cause the building to sway (I think I made a wrecking ball joke). I looked out the window, but people on the street seemed to be walking along normally, though S███ said she spotted a man sitting on a stoop looking confused. It was all very surreal (I was under the impression that earthquakes just don’t happen in New York). Not until S███’s father sent her an “Are you okay, there was an earthquake” text did we have an answer, though if he had waited 30 more seconds I would have seen it on my work Twitter account (which was blowing up, Ke$ha-style).

The office. Luckily it was a minor earthquake, or I would have been crushed by a tub of power tools. If there was a God who loved humanity, He would have caused an earthquake strong enough to toss Tavin (bottom center) out of the window and in front of a Mack truck while sparing all other living beings.

It happens that I grew up on the Alabama coast, so I have lost the fear of God with regard to hurricanes. Irene was a bummer because they closed public transportation about 16 hours in advance of the hurricane, thus preventing me from going to the party that was one of the main reasons for my visit to New York in the first place. It happened during the night: mainly a lot of wind and rain. There was some minor flooding nearby and uprooted trees blocking roads toward the Park Slope area. It so happens that Sara’s neighborhood was not a flood risk, but even if it was, I would not have left.

ALSO, DAVE & BUSTERS IN TIMES SQUARE

Late that Thursday, S███ dragged me to the Dave & Buster’s in Times Square that is open past midnight. Dave & Buster’s is an adult-oriented arcade space that sells $10 Bud Lights. It is located a floor above the infamous Times Square Applebee’s. To annoy her I kept saying things like, “Is that the Empire State Building?” and “Is this Times Square?” in exactly the tone and volume an actual curious tourist would use. We spent all our tickets on Wonka candy. Afterward she dragged me to the Forever 21 that is open past midnight in Times Square. There were some French women there, one of whom was wearing white canvas shoes.

WHAT AM I READING RIGHT NOW?

Well, since you asked, I am on a huge Kenzaburo Oe kick. Oh man, also, have any of you read The Master and Margarita? It was so good. I wasn’t expecting it to be so good.

THE BIKE LOCK SAGA

Don’t get me started; don’t even get me started! I locked my super-rad orange road bike (you know, whatever) at a parking meter outside of Starbucks, where I was meeting So███ so we could work together (we both “work from home”). Once the day was done, I went back to my bike, only to discover that I didn’t have my keys in any of my four pants pockets, two jacket pockets, or five backpack compartments. I retraced my steps with So███: Starbucks, Chipotle, CVS, but was unable to find what I was searching for. In the Chipotle a solicitous individual volunteered his girlfriend’s (?) bike keys. Apparently, U-locks are so generic that you can often use random keys to unlock one. I tried, and in fact the woman’s key opened one of my locks. Unfortunately, I always use two, which meant my bike was still locked to the meter.

After a grumpy weekend of me idly wondering if I could borrow an angle grinder or perhaps use a two-by-four to pop the lock, I google “how to break a u lock” and discover a video showing a guy popping a lock in two minutes using a car jack. I’m sitting across from So███ when I learn about this, so I lean forward and ask her if she has a car jack I can borrow. She texts A███, and he drives over to pick her up and brings the jack. I expect the operation to take ten minutes, but it does not. In fact, the jack gets stuck on the lock, and it takes me maybe fifteen minutes of peeling away the lock’s rubber coating to free it. A███ and So███ leave while I keep trying. There are two American Red Cross canvassers on the sidewalk, and I listen to them pitching the whole time I try to pop my lock. Whenever there were joggers, the canvassers would say, “What are you running from?!” which I thought was kind of funny. The female canvasser was friendly to me: whenever I pried the car jack off, she would say, “Did you get it!!??” and I’d be like, “Ha, ha!! No. Oh my God, close though.”

After an hour of laboring clumsily over a car jack on a bike that keeps rolling around, one starts to feel like a right fool.

Christ Bananas, the effort this production took.

Finally, it happens. The lock comes off. Unfortunately, I rendered the front derailleur janky in the process of wrestling with the bike lock. So I walked my bike to a bike shop. I was very anxious, because I was wearing a particularly appropriated-bike-culture outfit (slim-fit jean shorts rolled just so at the cuffs, Brooklyn Industries polo shirt, Adidas Sambas with no socks), and was afraid the bike shop guys would hurt my feelings. But they were friendly enough, and fixed the front derailleur for free (it had only been knocked askew). Unfortunately, I also had somehow messed up the chain wheel in a way that would “run [me] about $100 to fix.” So from now on, I can only use the smaller front gear. Anyway.

On the bright side, looking for my spare bike keys, I found my long-lost eyeglasses rolled up in an air mattress.

HOW DID I GET SO BAD

 A█████ texts me and I say I’ll be there soon but I end up watching internet videos for half an hour before leaving. When I arrive, he is doing some bike maintenance. I sit there being empty-headed for a while. Av███ comes and sits next to me, but then he goes off somewhere. Later A█████ and I are grocery shopping. I pick up a tin of anchovies and say, “Anchovies are so expensive,” and he says, “Just put it in your pocket.”

Later, we walk to the pond and stash our stuff by the boathouse. I throw my wallet into a bush. A█████ says, “You just had to bring swim shorts that look like boxers.” When we get to the beach, there are some people there, but we figure they won’t care. The water is cold, but not so cold, and we walk in slowly until the water is navel height and then plunge in. The only building visible above the trees has most of its windows lit, and we swim in its direction, instead of directly toward the boathouse. I am an extremely weak swimmer and pretty much spend the entire time gasping and doggy-paddling. A█████ says, “Do you know the breast-stroke?” and I say, “I only know how to freestyle. But I have my contacts in.”

NEVER HAVE I FELT SO AMERICAN

J███ and Ar████ are going to IKEA, so I hitch a ride. We enter gridlock, and finally decide we have to stop and eat. We consult the telephone to see if there are any Chik-Fil-As around, but they are all either north or west of Boston Proper. We end up going to a Chipotle in an outlet mall. We talk about Chipotle: how it’s too bad David Foster Wallace passed, because now he can’t write an essay about eating Chipotle burritos in an outlet mall. I get a red chest of drawers and a black bookcase. When I tell S███ that I got a red chest of drawers, she says that that’s what men do: they get red things for their bedrooms, because they think that things in bedrooms should be red. They just don’t know any better.

WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO WITH YOUR LIFE

I’m going to get what I want.

4.2 Alexander Spends a Year In Boston

After a (cosmically) brief hiatus, I will now begin updating my personal blog again. For the sake of continuity, I will provide an overview of my time so far in Somerville, a neighborhood in the Greater Boston Area.

MY APARTMENT IN SOMERVILLE

I found an apartment on Craigslist and moved in August 1st, 2010. It is in the third story of a house with a shabby brownish-purple paint job. In the morning a shaft of sunlight falls directly on my bed. If I’m feeling indulgent I take off my shirt and lay reading with my feet on the window sill. I bought an orange road-bike during my brief stay in New York between Europe and Massachusetts, and after a month or so in Somerville I brought it up in the cargo hold of a Megabus. I haul my bike up from landing to landing, usually banging and scuffing the walls, and store it outside my apartment’s front door. I might start keeping it on the ground-floor landing, as somebody just moved away an old bookcase that used to take up most of the room under the stairs. Besides, the landlord just painted the stairway’s walls.

UPS STORE #1

I got a job at a UPS Store, where I packed boxes, processed packages for shipment, and sorted mail for a wage low enough that I couldn’t afford to maintain a reasonable first-world quality of life, but not so low that I could, for instance, go on food-stamps. The man who hired me was in the process of selling the store, and after I worked there a month the sale was finalized. Within several weeks there was, excluding me, a full staff turnover.

A husband and wife co-owned the store. The wife was actually very nice—she would sometimes bring me home-cooked Indian-style rice in a pyrex container for lunch. She was very business-like when she informed me that now that the store was under new management, my wage would be lowered $.50.

Her husband was pretty awful. We started off on very good terms—he valued my intelligence and the institutional knowledge I brought to the table. I remember once I helped him compose a notice for mailbox holders about how we were phasing in a rate increase: he was very happy with me that day. After he looked over the final draft, we shook hands. It was a beautiful moment, let me tell you.

Things went south shortly. (I think because he realized the store was not proving as profitable as he had hoped.) His management style became paternalistic and bullying. He was constantly (sometimes as often as five times a shift) pulling me aside to chastise me. He would also often compare me to his sixteen-year-old son. If I didn’t do something the way he wanted, it was because I hadn’t learned responsibility yet.

It was endless. What was especially sick was how the wife seemed to get an anxious enjoyment from watching me get chastised (I was often compared unfavorably to her). I don’t blame her: I can just imagine what living with him is like.

Somerville is largely an enclave of white, educated, wealthy liberal white people. Many of them have an affiliation with Harvard. Many of the older women dress like they might be witches. Early Saturday mornings you see young people in oversize sunglasses walking up and down Mass Ave., rolled yoga mats snug between their torso and an elbow. However, the area is also very touristic. Crazies are prominent. Conspiracy theorists, schizophrenics, people who push around shopping cards that smell of urine, young punky runaways who may or may not be bipolar, etc.

A woman with one bottom tooth would come in every so often to the store asking me inane questions to look up on the internet for her. For instance: “Look up the witches ride in Western Mass. I want to know about the witches ride in Western Mass.” I could ascertain that she meant some sort of Halloween spectacle, but I couldn’t get anything more specific from her. She’d make me turn the computer screen to face her and then tell me to click on the Google AdSense ads and to print the home pages.

Once she came in with dried blood all over the front of her grimy sweatshirt. She asked me what Ronald Reagan’s address and phone number was. I informed her President Reagan died ten years ago. She still wanted to know. So I gave her the number and address of his estate.

Once I finally told her (with the utmost politeness and friendliness) that it wasn’t my job to look things up for her and that she could use the time-share computer if she wanted. Things had seriously gotten out of hand with her by this time–she would monopolize me for fifteen minutes, making inane demands, one after the other. She also had an IQ under 70 and was probably homeless—she had no business wasting her money printing out useless webpages. She had clearly never used the internet before, and after two minutes she left. My boss took the occasion to chastise me. “What if another customer had seen you treating her like that?” he asked, and then looked at me with utter contempt, just waiting for my piss-poor response. (The ironic thing is that he would rush into the back whenever she came in or, if he couldn’t do that, because for instance he was manning the counter while I was sorting mail, he would pointedly ignore her until I came out to help her.)

THE BAND

Josh & I began having jam sessions in his room shortly after I moved to Boston. He lived above a convenience store a short walk from P-rter Square. I would come over and we’d sit on his bed and make music. Soon we had a band: Sonia, a friend of his from high school who plays viola, joined, and we would take the 77 bus up to her house in Arlington to practice. She has a large practice room with a piano. She is much more musically talented than we are, but it worked well enough because she was teaching herself how to play drums (just like, I supposed, Josh and I were teaching ourselves guitar and piano, respectively).

Josh is gone now, and Sonia and I don’t make music anymore, though we hang out fairly regularly. Sometimes when I am biking to Market Basket to do grocery shopping I look up at the window of the bedroom where Josh used to live.

When I was waiting tables in Manhattan last year, I always had a lot of time to think, and sometime I would think about the tables—how the guests came and went, but the tables stayed. Five minutes after a couple left, I’d take the flatware and glasses and cutlery away and, corner by corner, pull up the tablecloth. Another tablecloth would go down, and new cutlery and glasses. Then, unless I had something better to do, I’d lean against the bar. Soon even I would be gone. I knew because I had a contract to go teach in France, beginning that fall.

Do you understand?

A THEORY I HAVE BEEN NURSING

My experiences at Rice and in the Boston area (which is just full of gifted individuals) have led me to form a theory about the way different types of people view the world.

People who are of above-average intelligence in the arts and humanities view themselves as a brilliant person inhabiting a world full of average people. They live a heightened, extraordinary existence. This is where the snobbishness and elitism come from.

People who are of above-average intelligence in the maths and sciences believe that they are a normal person inhabiting a world full of abysmally stupid people. This is where the frustration and ill-concealed contempt come from.

SOMERVILLE: LIBERAL UTOPIA

One of the mailbox holders at the UPS Store had a daughter aged nine years who probably has undiagnosed ADHD. One day the woman came in with her daughter to get some keys cut. The daughter chattered while I cut the keys. In response to my question of what grade she was in: “Oh, I don’t go to school. I’d be much more intelligent than all the other students. I’m home-schooled. The school system wasn’t made for people like me.”

The mother smiled. “That’s right. You’d be terribly bored if you had to keep pace with all those other students.”

The little girl started talking about her curriculum–geography, biology, wacky science, etc. Suddenly the topic turned to gay marriage. “Did you know that a person can marry a man or woman if they want to?”

The mother smiled. “That’s exactly right!”

Throughout all this, a middle-aged woman was minding her business, making photocopies at one of the self-serve copiers. The girl abruptly turned to this woman. “Excuse me, are you married to a man or a woman?”

The woman took pause and said, “Well, I’m not married, but if I were married I’d be married to a man.”

“You could date a girl if you wanted! Do you have a boyfriend or a girlfriend?”

“Uh. I’m currently single.”

The mother, totally ignoring the middle-aged woman, turns to her daughter and takes a gently pedantic sweetheart–what-do-you-say-when-someone-gives-you-a-slice-of-pie tone. “Now, a person can marry a man or a woman, but they might not be equally happy with both choices. Most people would prefer either one or the other! You see, this woman would prefer to marry a man.”

When I was in middle school, I remember teachers would sometimes tell students (usually if they were misbehaving): “I’m going to give you a dime, and I want you to call me and tell me in ten years what you are doing.”

UPS STORE #2

I got a job at another UPS Store. I saw a sign in the door and two weeks later I was full time. The wage was much nicer, for the class of work. The store didn’t smell like mildew either, and had lots of natural lighting.

My boss at the second UPS Store is basically richer than God. A Pakistani who was educated in Canada and the Philippines, he ran a convenience store in Medford for about twenty years, becoming a local institution and amassing wealth he, to my knowledge, never spent on anything except the occasional lavish party and a nice house he doesn’t spend very much time in. He retired, but found retirement directionless. He promptly bought a UPS Store franchise, bought another convenience store that a relative of his manages, and is currently in the process of selecting another franchise to open in the next year or so (top contenders include but are not limited to Rising Roll, Moe’s Southwestern Grill, and Beef O’Brady’s). At the UPS Store he works every shift, open to close, seven days a week. When people call on the phone and ask if they need to make an appointment to have something notarized, I tell them that the notary is always in and no appointment is necessary.

To celebrate the second anniversary of his opening the store, he threw a dinner party in the restaurant of the Hyatt Regency, a pyramidal hotel on the Charles River. He is extremely gregarious, and on most days he literally doubles over in hysterical laughter, usually over things that don’t make very much sense. The vast majority of people who come to the store have come before, and he never forgets a customer. There are a lot of regulars. I was under the impression that he was basically extending an open invitation, because he seemed to invite every second person who walked into the store, some of whom he didn’t usually seem over-friendly with, and, when he ran the convenience store in Medford, he apparently threw parties with hundreds of people in attendance.

One of the regulars is the owner of an independent video rental place a couple stores down. He comes in to make color photocopies of DVD covers. He reminds me of my father in certain was: he is in early middle age and has a cheery, generous conviviality. The convenience store my boss at UPS owns has a never-ending saga involving the slurpee machine. The convenience store had a slurpee machine, but the machine couldn’t legally be operated until a very special sink was installed. These types of sinks cost several thousand dollars and don’t have any real function—apparently my boss was trying to fight city hall about it. A running joke between my boss and the video store guy involved slurpees. “When am I going to get one of those slurpees?” the video store guy asks. “You know, what you guys need is a slurpee machine in here. Right here, by the copier. You’d make a killing, I promise.” My boss would double over, one hand on the counter. “Hey!” the video store guy would say, pronouncing it the exact same way my father would if he were making the same kind of joke. “Where’s my slurpee?”

I assumed this video store individual had been invited to the second anniversary dinner, so when he came in one day, about a week before the dinner, I said, “Hey, are you coming to the boss’s party?” and he said, “What party?” I said, “Uhhh. Oh.”

My boss was sorting mail in the back, and he walked in to the front, behind the counter, because he heard someone come in. I turned to him and said, “I was just talking about the party…”

My boss shook his head, and I became opaque. This is something I see people do, but I have almost never done as an adult: consciously and publicly remove myself from a social situation while still being physically present. It’s like being the polite silent third person in a conversation, only with no desire to join in. This is something I ought to have learned how to do years ago. It would have saved me a lot of senseless grief. I’m usually too empathetic. Even if I can’t do anything when things go south, I’m still casting about nervously, trying to be helpful. When couples argued, I’d butt in and try to force a reconciliation, not realizing that easy reconciliation wasn’t what they wanted. Either that or I’d become visibly anxious, making plans to make things work. Going opaque is something I see girls do when their boyfriend is speaking for them—when he flags down the waitress and points to his date’s overcooked steak, the date sits with this dissociated, drugged look on her face. If the waitress were dense enough to address her directly, the girlfriend wouldn’t say anything at all, though she might shift in her chair or slink her shoulders a bit. My boss shook his head and I dissociated, jabbing my left index finger at the POS system.

My boss turned to the video store guy. “Oh, you’re so busy. You wouldn’t like it. Really, you’re so busy.”

He was clearly confused. “Well, I mean. I’m not that busy.”

“Oh, you’re so, so busy. You wouldn’t enjoy it anyway.”

Five minutes later, when the door closed, I turned to my boss and said, “I’m so, so sorry.”

“No no. Don’t worry about it.” So I didn’t, thought I turned it over in my head, trying to understand it. He later explained that he didn’t want the video store guy to come because he was full of bullshit, and my boss had no desire or obligation to invite him. He was honest about it, and that was that: I had apparently done absolutely nothing wrong.

Later I pieced the story together. My boss had asked the video store guy to hold onto a copy of The Town, a new release at the time, so that he (my boss) could rent it. The video store guy said he would, but didn’t for whatever reason follow through. After waiting a few days, my boss sent a regular he’s friendly with to go rent it for him. When she came back with the video, he realized then and there that the video store guy was full of bullshit: good for a few laughs when he came in, but not worthy of an invitation to the dinner.

The dinner was very nice. I brought my friend Sara, and everyone assumed we were married. I drank maybe five gin and tonics. I ordered a creme brulee for desert, and when it came out it had a candle on it and everyone sang me happy birthday. I was shocked–my birthday is something I usually conceal, and very rarely does someone (let alone a boss) do something for me because of it.

Afterward Sara commented, “Your reaction seemed disproportionately grateful.”

SOMERVILLE: LIBERAL UTOPIA (2)

I had a job interview for a administrative position at a university, so I was dressed in what at the time were my nicest clothes. When I came home I changed out of my slacks and into a pair of grey jeans, but otherwise I stayed dressed up for the rest of the day, adding a peacoat when I walked my friend Albert back to the T. We’d spent the evening cooking a big greasy meal and then watching a bit of a movie while he flirted (aggressively) with my roommate.

Once Albert was gone and I was alone with my thoughts, instead of heading back up the hill to my place I trudged down the street toward a grocery store from which I had no intention of  buying anything. Very rarely am I in a state where I’m so dissociated that I don’t know what’s going on around me. Sometimes, when you ask someone a question, they don’t answer it, because they choose not to make the mental effort to process what you said. I’m usually not like that. When I began crossing the intersection, the light definitely indicated walk.

A woman biking past, just as she turned the corner, said, “Could you walk any slower?”

Though I don’t remember much else, I do remember that I stereotyped her instantly: ratty shoes, fashionable scarf, mid-twenties, white, short hair, probably college-educated, probably tattoos, a bike that was stylish but sensible. I could imagine her at a party: guys like her, histrionic when making a point, generous with cigarettes, funny and cultured, thinks the fact that boys are taught from a young age to hide their emotions is profoundly sad. This might not all be true, but everything comportment pointed toward it. I’ve realized more and more that you can judge books by covers–that’s, after all, what covers are for. Her way of saying it: sassy, totally unshaken in the belief that she was in the right to say it. Even now, months later, I wish I could have her in front of me, so I could put my finger in her face and tell her, “You have no idea what an unforgivable bitch you were that night when you biked past me,” though I know for a fact that I would get no satisfaction from saying that–that I’d probably, actually, get more satisfaction from having the chance to say it but never saying it.

It’s strange, because these things must happen all the time. If everything goes according to plan, it will happen to me three more times, maybe within the next five years. It happened to people at Rice—a lot of them, I’m sure, and they kept it mainly private, and carried on. And I guess I kept it private myself. Either way, it is a lot sunnier in Houston than it is in Boston.

WHAT A SAINT

I stayed for a week in Brooklyn recently with my friend Sara. She is (among other things) working as an intern for a business improvement district in Flatbush. As the BID was having a graffiti clean-up the Saturday I was there, I had to go along. I scraped wheat-pasted posters off the outside of a Walgreens with a putty knife and painted over graffiti on a bridal shop’s storefront rolling gate. The next day I would tell mutual friends at a biergarten that Sara and I had done a beautification project with the Brooklyn Gentrification Taskforce, which annoyed Sara. After the clean-up Sara and I went to Coney Island. We napped on a vintage flat sheet, each taking turns holding the beach umbrella in place (it flew away once). I was sure my feet would burn, but they didn’t. Afterward we went to the arcade and played skeeball. Then photobooth photos, and the long train ride home.

A DAY IN THE LIFE

Today, for instance. I woke up and biked home and sat around in my bed feeling anxious for ten minutes. I chatted with my roommate and took a shower. I went to Starbucks and researched the foreclosure industry (I got a new job about  month ago). I watched impassively as the Dow Jones dropped and I googled “double-dip recession,” which I think should be renamed the herpes recession. I went to Chipotle for lunch, and I put so much salt and lemon juice on my nachos that my tongue turned red and started breaking out, which usually only happens when I pig out on sour-chemical candies. I left my Mr. Pibb on the counter when I went to use the restroom, and in the time it took me to grin (left, right) in the mirror, pick at my teeth, and wash my hands, an employee had disposed of my drink, though I had hidden it behind the napkin station.

I walked a bit in the sun with my red windbreaker on and went to Goodwill. Went back to Starbucks. Used the “treat receipt” coupon, which seems to piss the baristas off whenever I do it, though I’m not sure why. Worked some more. Came home exhausted for no good reason and napped for two hours. Picked up Goodbye Columbus again. It isn’t a masterpiece by any stretch of the imagination but a nice quick read nonetheless. I put my contacts back in and put some stuff in my hair and went for a bike ride by the Charles River. Down, down, down the trail to Boston, and then back again, past the black river with is blurry reflections and lapping wakes. I went to Shaw’s and got the fruit that had the Shaw’s Card discount. I biked home with the plastic bag in one hand. By the light of the bulb above the stove I ate a quarter of a watermelon and a white nectarine, which was almost completely flavorless. I also ate some sardines and rye toast with cream cheese on it. I washed the dishes by hand, as our apartment doesn’t have a dish-washing machine. Now I’m getting around to publishing this blog.

Jealous?

Selected Search Terms

I’ve taken this blog off search engines in hopes of eventually getting a job where I don’t have a uniform polo shirt. But at one point, people could find my blog by googling search terms. Most of these search terms are variations on my name. For your entertainment I’ll share some of the more interesting ones.

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and, my favorite:

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