Corey sat in the library, the sunlight creeping towards her across the table, completely stumped. Vaguely irritated, she looked out the huge windows before her and surveyed the light layer of snow over the still green grass. She saw evergreens, dead-looking shrubs and a highway. There was an ugly office building across the highway and a traffic light blowing in the wind. A few of the leaves left of the shrubs rustled in the wind she couldn’t hear or feel and cars motored past on the highway she could only observe.

She paused to blow her nose and immediately felt unfortunately conspicuous. The Asian girl at the next table over sat in her zipped-up jacket with her backpack on, pouring over three small books she had appeared with about half an hour previously. Corey wondered what they were. A white-haired, balding man paced by, perusing the tax information provided by the library as the sun started to inch up Corey’s arms. This bothered her almost more than her inability to complete an essay. She was very sensitive to temperature and had been perfectly comfortable before the sun started to heat her up. She had already moved once and figured this was her comeuppance for sitting by the huge windows.

Somewhere behind her, a tutorial was going on. It had been since she arrived and she couldn’t figure out for the life of her what it was for. Physics, maybe. Or some standardized test involving physics. They were wrapping it up now, exchanging schedules and promising to call each other. A white minivan drove by.

Corey had come to the library to avoid her dog. This sounded rather infantile but the dog was having one of those days where she was all over the place and unhappy in all of them. This was particularly grating to someone attempting to write an essay that would hopefully secure her a place at the Cooper-Hewitt Museum in New York City for ten weeks in the upcoming summer. But apparently it wasn’t the dog. After some serious ponderance, Corey had come to the conclusion that it was not the dog, it was not her but it was, in fact, the question. This question that she had answered a hundred times over in applying to various things. “Describe your career goals and specific areas of interest.” Tell us your story, the essay question asked politely with a fake smile and a quirk of its head intended to show interest. Corey didn’t believe any of it and labored over making the essay interesting. She doubted that she would ever been happy with whatever she wrote and longed for mediocrity so she could just have it done and perhaps fine-tune it later.

The sunlight had now almost reached her neck. It reminded her of drowning. As the sunlight went up her body, she thought that her deadline would be when it went over her head. She liked setting these random deadlines for herself. It made her complete things. Yet still she sat, ineffectually writing something that wasn’t her essay. Enlightenment did not come to her and she had no idea what to actually write. Of course she had career goals and specific interests and of course she could tell the people at the Cooper-Hewitt all about them, but now her brain seemed intent upon making the essay interesting and different. She wanted to write it like a work of fiction, like a story. History is a story, she thought to herself, hoping she had finally stumbled onto the cohesive theme for her essay. History is a story and here is mine.

That’s where she choked. History is a story and here is mine inevitably led to her story. The story she had told a million times and was sick of so doing. She was sorely tempted to just recycle one of the other essays but this didn’t appeal to her sense of improvement over the years. She sincerely hoped that her writing has somehow improved over the past years and that using an essay from a year ago would show less-than-stellar writing. Not that her current writing was stellar. She didn’t flatter herself with that. She only hoped to consider it “better.”

Looking over one of the old essays, she didn’t think she would write it much differently now. It was written in basically the same style she always wrote in. She could just use it. Edit the last two paragraphs where she mentioned “Oxford” and make them read something equally inspirational about the Cooper-Hewitt. She could.

The sun was starting to reach her eyes now. This had to stop. She couldn’t work with sun in her eyes. That was intolerable. She sighed and looked out the window again. There were no cars on the highway and the light was green. The wind seemed to have picked up but she couldn’t really tell. She longed to just write the damn essay but it would not come for all her free-writes and thinking. She imagined the shrubs making a rustling noise as they silently swayed beyond the window. She felt sorry for the fichus plant near her table. It probably wanted to be outside with the other plants but remained perpetually indoors. Thoughts like that sort of annoyed her. She shouldn’t be thinking about fichus plants, she should be thinking about her career goals and specific interests!

She had to baby-sit in about an hour and a half. She was vaguely hungry. She wanted desperately to write this essay. But she couldn’t.

Travels to Erie (and back again)

After giving up on the M*A*S*H retrospective a little before eleven, both Dad and I went to bed. I slept on a couch that used to live in prominence at our house in Williamsville but has now been relegated to a mere half-life in Dad's Erie apartment. We joke about the apartment, that it is where our random things go to die. Erie is just a step above the trash heap. Things will be saved for my future, hypothetical apartment before they will be sent to Erie. I slept on one of these such relics that has gone into retirement in Erie. Dad slept in his comfy bed up the iron spiral staircase in the loft.

I awoke in the morning remarkably well rested but, strangely, itchier than I had been before reposing on the couch. Come to discover that the couch - like Posie and like the Swamp on M*A*S*H - was flea infested and that the fleas had happily gobbled on my delicious skin throughout the night! This comes after battling fleas on Posie for most of the break. Apparently, she has infested Dad's apartment, now even more pathetic because of the bug content. In any event, I am now flea-bitten in numerous spots on my legs and have dumped everything and anything that went to Erie in the washing machine. My first first of 2007: being flea-bitten. You can imagine my glee.

After this discovery, Dad decided he will set off (another) flea-bomb (yes, such things exist) in his apartment and we set off for the vet's office. Posie's flea collar was obviously not working properly. So I finally got to meet the famous "Dr. Dan," Posie's vet. He is young, as Dad said, and worked very well with Posie. I think she's just mellowing in old age, but she's less exciteable and skittish than she used to be. This does make her a fantastic driving companion, though, since she simply snoozes away in the backseat with a bark or a whine for the entire trip. What more could you ask for from a dog?

Anyway, post-vet, I returned to the apartment with Posie and Dad went to work. Dad's apartment, as I've said, is a rather pathetic dumping ground. The bookshelves from my bedroom in L.A. somehow migrated to Erie and became filled with various gifts I've bestowed upon my father over the years in hopes of bringing a little life to the apartment. Miniature maple syrup jars rest inside a disk made from an old vinyl LP. A home-made chess set - complete with pieces made out of rocks from our backyard in Williamsville - sits on a shelf unused with an old picture of the three of us from Christmas resting above it, frameless. Some pictures and comics I drew for his walls are nestled in the shelving unit and the walls remain bare. A gigantic, rock globe - a gift from Australia from Bubbie and Grandpa - also somehow went to Erie and now also lives on the shelf. An ancient television set occupies the main space of the lowest shelf, surrounded by home improvement magazines and five books. The television itself is not by any means in its prime and, if a viewer should care to flip around, he or she may only flip down in the channel numbers, never up again.

An unused treadmill and an equally abandoned miniature recording studio live in the opposite corner of the apartment. Dad's keyboard was loaned to the Erie Philharmonic and, as he sheepishly admits, he's never bothered to get it back. Two guitars are stacked in front of a mirror beside the bookshelf and our dining room table from L.A. lives almost under the iron stairs. For the longest time, Dad only had one chair since he was the only one who ever ate at the apartment. Finally, Mom and I came to visit and he had to buy two more. One as since disappeared so the table remains set for two. One chair is open for occupation and the other with a bag full of dog kibble the size of a small person living on it.

The kitchen is small but completely outfitted with appliances from the mid-1990s if not before. Commonly, the fridge houses an onion, a Brita water filter, some ketchup and whatever pasta sauce Mom made over the weekend and sent off to Erie for Dad to live off of for a week. I can only assume Dad doesn't eat at the apartment very often or that he gets take-out. Posie's dish - went she is in residence - just sits in the middle of the kitchen floor since the space is occupied so infrequently and it is in such close proximity to the enormous bag of kibble that will take her "twelve more years to get through," according to my father. But it was cheap so it came home.

The rest of the apartment consits of the loft upstairs which houses my dad's bed, closet and the only bathroom. The lighting throughout the apartment is shotty, with about two lamps and three lights. It very much suggests the life of someone who just goes to sleep when it gets dark rather than trying to artifically prolong the daylight hours. I know for a fact Dad doesn't do this (except maybe in summer when it's light until ten or later). Presumably he watches television until bed.

I don't know what inspired me to describe the place, I just felt like it. Hopefully you aren't too bored with such a description. Dad's apartment is truly something unto itself. I don't remember where I left off in the narrative but, suffice to say, on the drive home I mistakenly headed for Buffalo went I should have headed for Albany, drove around in Cheektowaga for a while and then finally rejoining the highway through a turn of luck. This eventually deposited me safely home at ten after three. All I want to do is sleep!