Conveyor Belt of Love

In January, I watched what was either the greatest television show ever or one of the seven signs of the apocalypse. The show was called, “Conveyer Belt of Love.”

Here’s the set up. Four women sat in chairs facing a stage featuring a moving conveyer belt. One at a time, men floated in front of the ladies. In less than a minute, a man had to make an impression on the women in the hopes that he would be chosen for a date. With a quick flash of signs that read “Interested” on one side and “Not Interested” on the other, the ladies either invited the men to get off the conveyer belt or encouraged their ride off the stage. If two ladies showed interest in the same man, the man could choose between the two. Then, he would come down from the conveyer belt and put himself on a platform featuring the chosen lady’s name. Later on, if the woman decided she liked the look of someone else, she could bump off the guy on her platform.

I think this is a fabulous idea. Let’s face it, within a few minutes of meeting someone, we can usually tell if we’re attracted to him/her. Of course, these guys had only a minute to put on their A game, and the first guy who floated out and admitted to living with his parents was given a flash of four “Not Interested” signs within a matter of seconds. Others played guitars and sang, while a few appeared in only their underwear in the grand hope that their physique would serve as the main attraction.

All four ladies went on dates, and while two of the ladies realized that their initial attraction wasn’t strong enough to keep a conversation going for more than five minutes, the other two ladies did seem to genuinely get along with their chosen men. A fifty percent chance of finding a nice companion after only seeing him in person for a few minutes? These are odds I like.
And so, dear reader, in the wake of my last break up, a looming Valentine’s Day, and my impending twenty year high school reunion, I did something I promised myself that I would never do again. I joined an on-line dating service.

I had actually joined this service about seven years ago when I was still in grad school. I met and had dates with three different men. These were all “good-on-paper” guys, but when I met them in person, I didn’t feel any spark of attraction. From this experience, I reasoned that on-line dating wasn’t for me.

However, I live in a tiny town, and my options are limited. I’d like to date again but outside the fishbowl I live in. The best way to meet men, I thought, would be on-line. Plus, two single friends, one here in Dillon and another in New York, had both met interesting men on-line. As one friend put, “It’ll do wonders for your self-esteem.”

Oh, how I wish that were true.

Once I joined the service I decided to make my profile invisible so that I could enjoy a “conveyer belt of love”-type experience. I would shop around for men who lived in Bozeman or Missoula, towns close enough to drive to easily but far enough away so that my personal and professional lives wouldn’t mix.

Browsing through the profiles was a fascinating but daunting experience. I quickly became overwhelmed with all of the choices, so like any good teacher, I had to devise a rubric or scale to rate my level of interest. Any man whose profile picture featured him proudly holding a fish (or any other dead animal, for that matter) was right out. That eliminated a good third of my choices (after all, it is Montana). Next, I started reading profile autobiographies and realized that I couldn’t take off my English professor hat. After looking at these writing samples, I knew I had to eliminate anyone who couldn’t be bothered to use spell check or write in non-texting language. There went another third.

With the remaining candidates, I saw a disturbing trend. A great many of them were outdoor enthusiasts who listed activities that involved either hurtling one’s self down the side of a snowy mountain at breakneck speeds or walking though forests with fifty pounds of gear on one’s back. This worried me. Where was the guy who admitted to liking channel surfing while eating Doritos? Or reading Dickens and the Huffington Post?

I consulted with my ex-boyfriend, Will, and he said that these guys weren’t necessarily looking for me to participate in these activities but perhaps for someone who can appreciate their interests. This made sense to me.

So I wrote to several of these men. I introduced myself and explained why my profile was hidden. I offered to send a picture and more information about myself. Then, the waiting began. Within a few days, I had some takers who were interested in seeing a picture and knowing more about me. I replied and sent on my picture, and again I waited . . . . and waited.

For the most part, none of these men emailed me again. So a week later, I sent out another batch of introductory emails to different men. A few replied to my emails, but once again, after I sent a picture, I never heard from any of them again.

Puzzled, I spoke to my best friend who used to live in Montana and had done some on-line dating. “Are you crazy?” she exclaimed. “Men in Montana are a**holes.” She told me a story of a man she had met on-line. They had exchanged emails and phone calls, and after a few weeks, he decided to visit her. They made arrangements for him to stay with friends and both were looking forward to meeting in person, but he never showed up. He never called her again. Unfortunately, she has a treasure trove of these types of on-line dating stories.

But what if it was me? After all, I’m 38 and still haven’t been able to make a relationship work. Clearly, I have some pretty unique baggage. I decided to re-read my emails and study the picture I had sent. Was the picture not good? Admittedly, I was wearing a sleeveless blouse and the way I was standing made my bicep look to be the size of a Virginia ham. Were my emails too intimidating? I did cop to being an English professor, but it’s not like I quoted Shakespeare or Derrida.

I could speculate endlessly on why these men weren’t interested in me, but the truth is that I’ll never know why they didn’t reply to my email.

So I decided to take myself off line and go with some friends to the one bar in town that my students don’t frequent. My mission that night was not to find someone to date but to find someone (preferably an out-of-towner) to have a minor fling with. My self-esteem needed a booster shot, and, in the past, I’ve been a fairly successful flirter. So I chatted up a man from Seattle who was passing through town. He seemed to respond well to me, and together with my friends, we closed out the bar. While I had hoped to spend some time alone with him, he left me quickly with a peck on the cheek, and I cried all the way home.

And now, I write to you on this Valentine’s Day, with my self esteem in the toilet. My “conveyer belt of love” experiment was a sign of the apocalypse after all. It may not be the end of the world, but it’s the end of my attempt to find love. If he wants me, he knows where he can find me, but for now, Cupid can kiss my ass.

Bridget Jones' Classroom

Just recently, a new colleague in my department experienced every professor’s worst nightmare. She forgot to go to class. On the first day.

See what happened was that, in her head, she mixed up the time of her class as being in the afternoon rather than in the morning. Her husband, also an instructor at the university, was in their shared office that morning and called her at home to say that her students were in the office, confused about their class.

She handled it like a pro, though. The next day in class, she began by introducing herself and asked, “Let’s break the ice by describing something stupid that we’ve done. Let me start…..”

After hearing about this, I realized that after teaching in higher education for fifteen years, I have quite a few stories of my own goofiness in the classroom. I believe I may rival Bridget Jones in her general inability to make it through any given day without lipstick on her teeth and her skirt tucked into her pantyhose (both things I’ve done, by the way).

In fact, just last month, I railed on my students for having such poor grammar that they were writing in incomplete sentences. I believe I said something like, “Really, at this level [it was a 300-level class] you should be writing in complete sentences.” Instead of marking the errors in their papers, I put a number in the margin next to a sentence with an error. The number corresponds to a punctuation and style key that tells students about the error and offers suggestions for fixing it. I passed out the key impatiently and told the students to get cracking on correcting the errors. The next day, a student pointed out my own proofreading error on the style key in which I wrote “to” instead of “two.” Awesome.

Once I was looking at a syllabus I had passed out a few years ago advising students to buy any “addition” of the novel they wanted. I also accidentally photocopied a summer school class application, which included my social security number, on the back page of a syllabus. And about ten years ago, I wrote to a student that “for all intensive purposes” she was set to pass the class. Oh yeah.

But my fumbling as a professor goes beyond the occasional typo. I’ve tripped over a trash can, kicked off a shoe during a particularly active discussion, backed into a black board which left chalk dust on my butt, and farted while I slid off a table I was sitting on (though the table creaked a lot so I don’t think anyone heard).

This of course doesn’t even touch all the technological boo boos I’ve made. While trying to turn on the classroom’s Smart Board, I angered it so much that the board’s lights flashed red and made a beep beep beeeeeeeeeeep noise that sounded like a heart monitor on a dying patient in a Meg Ryan movie. In another class, I couldn’t get the slide clicker/laser pointer to work, and after changing the battery and restarting the computer, I had to have an IT staffer show me the on/off switch on the clicker itself.

And I know I’m not the only teacher who’s been Bridget Jones-ing it in the classroom, so I’m leaving this column intentionally short to allow editions…..wait…..additions by readers (either who are teachers or who, as students, have been witness to some pretty goofy things).

Fraidy Cat

I’m not what you would call a sporty person. I’ve never felt the need to run or jog (except after an ice cream truck or the Schwan’s guy), and the idea of chasing after a ball whether it be volley, foot, base, or basket in nature has never appealed to me.

I do, however, love to swim. When I was 8 or 9, my parents encouraged (read: forced) my brother to stop staring at the television and join our neighborhood swim team. As a tag-a-long little sister, I begged to be included in this endeavor and every summer until I was 18, I swam with the local team. I hardly won any races, but I learned all of the strokes and am now able to swim long distances quite easily.

So when a friend asked me to join her and a few others on a trip to swim Clark Canyon Dam, I said yes, excitedly. I’ve swum in open water before, but only for play. It was during this excursion that I realized that I am a big, stinkin’ ‘fraidy cat.

First, you should know that the water was frickin’ frackin’ freezing. It literally took my breath away. Next, you should know that the water was filled with algae. Little strands hung suspended in the water and large globs of it floated all around me.

And here’s what nobody told me about swimming in open water. It’s dark! Unlike the pool with its semi-clean, chlorinated water and clear, black lane lines, the lake water was dark as night. I put my face in to begin my free-style crawl, but I almost immediately pulled my head up and shook myself like a dog. I just couldn’t do it. I couldn’t swim and not know where I was going and what was beneath me. I was pretty sure the canyon dam wasn’t home to any sea monsters, but I did know that the dam covered a small town called Armstead. I half expected ghostly post-resident Amstead-ian arms to reach up and grab my ankles.

So, I turned over on my back and began to do the back stroke. Ah, this is the life, I thought. I hardly ever do the backstroke in the pool because I’m afraid I’m going to bump my head on the pool’s edge, but in the open water, what would I bump into? Well, as it turned out, something bumped into me. A large pelican had been quietly swimming closer and closer to me as I swam, and when I turned on my side to check my progress, I saw Pete the Pelican coming in for the kill. Seriously, this pelican charged me! I let out a yelp loud enough to scare both of us and he flew away.

Since I was too scared to put my head down, I proceeded to swim the breast stroke, but with my head sticking out of the water like a 95-year-old granny. I may as well have been wearing a bathing costume and floral swim cap with a neck strap.

I swam like this for an hour, and my partner, who was paddling along in a kayak, and I switched places. Unlike me, she had no problem putting her head under water and swimming an industrious crawl. She finished her part in about half the time as I did.

We celebrated our swim with warm towels and a thermos of hot cocoa. When I got home I peeled off my swim suit and realized that I was covered in green slime. Because I had kept my head above water, the algae had no problem making its way down my cleavage, leaving me with slick, green boobs that smelled like a salad. I looked like an alien.

I didn’t used to be so fearful. It’s known far and wide that I’m a champion worrier (and I have the bunched up intestines to prove it), but I’m usually pretty good about taking risks. I’ve moved all over the country to universities where I haven’t known anyone. I’ve gone hang gliding. I’ve been a model (in various states of undress) for art classes while I was doing my undergraduate work.

But lately I’ve noticed that I’m less likely to take risks. After my somewhat bad turn at a carnival this past summer (see my last column), I didn’t chance any rides at this year’s carnival in Dillon. I usually like the rush of adrenaline I feel when I’m at the top of the ferris wheel, but now, I think that rush is really stupid. Why should I put myself through the palm-sweating experience?

One of my favorite movies is Albert Brooks’ Defending Your Life (1991). In it, Brooks plays Daniel Miller, a man who has died and gone to a place called Judgment City. While he’s there, Daniel discovers that he has a lawyer who will literally defend his life. In order to move on to the next place (an undefined heaven), Daniel must prove that he has conquered his fears. If he can’t, he will be sent back to earth to try again. During his trial, prosecuting attorney Lena Foster, played by the feisty Lee Grant, shows movie-like clips of Daniel’s life to demonstrate that he hasn’t overcome his fears.

If there really is a Judgment City and I do have to defend my life, I wonder what clips the prosecution will show from my life. The time I gave into peer pressure and signed a classmate’s petition to run for class president in high school? The time I needed to look for a leak in my roof but I froze at the bottom of the attic stairs and then made my boyfriend go up there? The million times I’ve listened to racist/sexist jokes and not said anything?

What might be if I stop being a ‘fraidy cat? If I stopped being afraid that people won’t like me (though I have a feeling that ship may have already sailed in certain cases)? If I push myself to enjoy rather than dread the rush of adrenaline that flushes my face and gives me a mild case of the shakes?

I can tell you this, if I hadn’t been too scared to put my head down at the dam lake, I wouldn’t have gone home with green algae down my bathing suit. And really, who wants to go through life with green boobies?

Quirky TV Shows Featuring a Strong Female Lead

With access to high speed internet this summer, I’ve taken to downloading shows and movies. After watching several episodes of Weeds, the title, “Quirky TV Shows Featuring a Strong Female Lead,” appeared in my queue as a genre that Netflix apparently feels is suited to my taste. The title also appropriately describes my summer vacation.

I’ve had a little too much time on my hands. After not being 100% satisfied with certain products, I called a lot of companies to complain. My call to L’Oreal about a greasy face cream netted me a refund check but my visit with a Victoria’s Secret sales clerk stuck me with a bra whose seams would show through fleece (there’s a reason why it was on clearance, ah-ha!).

My best interaction was with the representative of the Keurig corporation, a company that makes single serving coffee makers. Mom purchased a Keurig coffee maker for my dad for Father’s day, and we all fell in love with it. The coffee maker uses little pre-measured cups (called K-cups) of coffee that are popped in and out of the maker. Dad is a straightforward cup-a-joe guy, but I like flavored coffee, so I purchased a K-cups box advertising that it contained Butter Toffee and Caramel Beurre coffee.

Unfortunately, I found that the 18 cup box contained 16 Butter Toffees and 2 Caramel Beurres. I called the company to complain about the inequity and hoped they would send me an entire box of Caramel Beurre as an apology. My complaint was met with silence. Then, the customer service representative tentatively suggested that I was, in fact, in possession of an entire box of Caramel Beurre…..because the term is French for “butter toffee.”

Apparently K-cups are popular in Canada where some are labeled in French.

Oh.

In all, it’s been a schizophrenic summer. I spent time with “all-American” families, widows, and carnies. I learned that I am too old for carnival rides (though never too old for funnel cake), I learned that if I get married, I’ll always have someone to buy hangover food for me, and I learned that the middle and ring finger of my right hand are virtually fingerprint free.

This last piece of knowledge came as a particular surprise. For a teaching license, I needed to undergo a background check which necessitated fingerprints. During the printing process, the officer at the Sheriff’s department printed me twice, and still, we couldn’t get clear prints on two fingers of my right hand. I guess, then, I can still embark on a crime spree using only my right middle and ring fingers. It’ll make lock picking difficult, but I’m sure I’ll manage.

In fact, only two days later, I did do something legally dodgy. At a store, I wanted to purchase a can of Virginia Peanuts, but no one was around to take my money. There were no other customers in the store, I poked my head into the back room and saw no one, and I called out for assistance. Crickets. So I wrote a note and tucked the cash into it. And then I left, with the peanuts under my arm. I’ve never done anything like this, and so far, the police haven’t come knocking on my door. Maybe they were confused by the odd fingerprints I left behind.

As it turns out, I needn’t have worried. The Montana Bureau of Justice has rejected my fingerprint cards, citing them as unreadable.

This whole fingerprinting incident really got me thinking about where I am as an adult. I mean, I’m lucky enough to have stayed off the grid for 37 years, which I think is a minor miracle given my penchant for speeding and making obscene gestures (which often occur at the same time).

However, in 37 years, I’ve managed to become less physically tolerant of being whipped around violently. As a child, I could climb off any carnival ride with a big smile and wild hair. This summer I discovered that those days are over. After 3 minutes on the swings at the Salem Fair, I tumbled off, listing heavily to the right, with very wobbly bowels. No, I learned, port-a-potties at a carnival are not fun.

On the flip side, at 37, I’m old enough to stay in the pool during the adult swim. This summer I swam most days at a nearby outdoor pool. I was entirely too excited the first time the lifeguard blew the whistle to announce the adult swim, and I realized that I could stay in while all the ankle biters had to get out. I floated in luxurious quiet on my swimming noodle.

One of the groovy things about going back to my hometown this summer was meeting up with high school friends. Of course, they’re all married with children (while I still ride the relationship short bus), but I was invited in for a glimpse of the “all-American” family at play.

During the weekends, the families in my friend’s cul-de-sac let the children play in the street while the adults, sometime nursing babies, sometimes nursing beer, supervise from their driveways. Though conversations were punctuated with, “Don’t do that!” “Leave your brother alone!” and “Take that off your head!” I learned several things about the “all-American” family.

I learned that perhaps the greatest invention of the 20^th century is the baby monitor. Parents can listen for kids up to mischief in their cribs from hundreds of yards away. With baby monitors clipped onto their belts, moms steadied a glass of wine in one hand while spraying bug repellant on a rowdy two-year old with the other.

I also learned that two-parent households are particularly adept at tag-team disciplining their kids. Employing the eyes in the backs of their heads and using a growl that could stop a team of horses in their tracks, these parents didn’t need to leave the comfort of their lawn chairs in order to scare the crap out of their kids.

I think the most interesting thing I learned about these married-with-children families is the built-in support system. Sure the parents shared the car-pooling and cooking responsibilities, but, most importantly, I learned that all the husbands drove out the morning after a particularly raucous Christmas party to buy their wives hangover food. This is a fringe benefit of marriage that I’d never heard about. I think I might have climbed on board the marriage roller coaster if I’d known that!

When I wasn’t spending time with the Great American Dream families or at the pool, I shared an occasional glass of wine with the widows who live in my parents’ condo building. With an average age of 75, these ladies are living the good life volunteering at church, taking pottery classes, and spending time with family.

They also taught me something about marriage—it’s a good ride that everyone should get on, but once it’s over, it’s good to stand on your own two feet. Hopefully without the listing and the loose bowels.

Blue Highways Revisited

In my last column, I discussed my need to get the hell out of dodge so I could shake the anger and misery of a bad school year. I’m not sure going on a cross country road trip was the way to do it.

During the last major road trip I undertook alone, I fell in love with William Least Heat Moon’s autobiographical book, Blue Highways. In it, Least Heat Moon describes a journey he took after divorcing his wife and losing his job. He outfitted his van with sleeping quarters and took to the road. While mapping out his trip, he decided to keep to the blue highways (the color of U.S. highways on older maps). Least Heat Moon’s autobiography begins as a simple journal about his trip but evolves into a more intimate account of his own spiritual journey.

Inspired by this and despite the farm animal settings my dad had prearranged (see my last column, “Mapping”), I decided to put TomTom to work. I programmed him to avoid the major interstates. I believed a trip down those lonely highways would soothe my troubled soul.

In the beginning, the blue highways were superb. Well, except for the cattle drive I ran into only 20 miles north of Dillon. I’ve lived in Montana for almost four years and had never seen a cattle drive. Of course, Murphy’s Law dictates that such an event would correspond with my soul journey. Riders on horses expertly moved the cows down the shoulder of the road, however, a couple of errant bovines decided to move down the middle of the road, aiming directly for my stopped car. It was then I learned that Montana cattle are bigger than my MINI Cooper. Luckily, Martha (my Cooper) didn’t appear interesting to the cattle, and they moved away from us.

Motoring along U.S. 12 in Montana, I got a look at central Montana, a place I hadn’t yet seen. The rolling hills and green grass brought a smile to my face, but I’ll admit what really pleased me was learning that the Town Pump franchise had planted itself along the highway. No matter how small, most of the towns I puttered through offered this well-equipped convenience store that allowed me to eat somewhat healthily on the road.

The last time I drove across the country by myself (15 years ago) convenience store fare was very different. Today’s convenience stores offer vegetarians like me the best invention since sliced bread: Campbell’s Soup At Hand. A minute and a half in the microwave and I was good to go. Don’t get me wrong; I love road junk food tremendously (Slurpees and Bugles and Ho-ho’s, oh my!), but I wanted to give my aging body a fighting chance at a b.m. at some point during the trip. (Hey, I'm a teacher. I'm always interested in outcomes.)

In fact, I drank at least one Soup At Hand each day, and while I was on the blue highways in the west, I had no trouble finding great convenience stores along the highway for my daily soup fix.

After Montana, I crossed through a tiny corner of Wyoming into South Dakota on U.S. 385. This beautiful blue highway afforded me an experience through the Black Hills that was breathtaking. Literally. Since I live in a town so small that trips to the grocery store only have me in my car for two minutes and so isolated that longer trips outside the county require strict attention to roads that may be littered with animals (see above), I don’t generally spend a lot of time cruising easily in my car.

On this trip, however, with my Ipod loaded with CDs I hadn’t listened to in a while, I enjoyed cranking up some tunes and singing loudly, badly, and, given the altitude, somewhat breathlessly. My favorite Black Hills CD was Barbara Streisand’s Broadway Album. Maybe it was her version of “Being Alive” that got me going or maybe it was the misguided notion that I actually sounded good when I sang along with Barbara, but when I was listening to that album, I felt great. My soul started to shed all the junk from the past year and leave it in the wind.

After South Dakota, I cruised happily on U.S. 20 through Nebraska and learned that no matter how small the town in Nebraska, there is always a Pizza Hut. I’m a big fan of the Hut, and though I didn’t stop to sample the pan pizza, I loved knowing that they were there.

In fact, during the first half of the trip, I enjoyed a great amount of abundance. There were plenty of places to eat and sleep, and I never worried about Gracie, my cockatiel who rode right beside me. I plied her with millet and Ritz crackers when she wasn't napping atop her stuffed bird. Life was good for both of us.

From Nebraska, I traveled into Iowa and saw something I rarely see in Montana: happy cows. Now, this is not to say that cows are unhappy in Montana, but when I observe cows pulling up dry grass and milling around aimlessly, I believe them to be dissatisfied with their lives. The cows I saw in Iowa were curled up, chewing their cud in the shade of large trees. They looked contented and peaceful.

Unfortunately, my time in Iowa was the last peace I was to find on the blue highways. Once in Illinois, I found that the blue highways were crowded with large towns through which TomTom skillfully guided me. However, unlike the blue highways of the West, the blue highways of the Midwest and East lack services.

Gone are the roadside convenience stores and cheap hotels. Such amenities in Illinois and Indiana are reserved for the numerous interstates that criss-cross the states. Fearing that I wouldn’t find gas or lodging on those highways, I decided to find the nearest on-ramp of a major interstate and just jet on to Virginia.

This turned out to be a huge mistake. If I had stuck to the blue highways, I would have made it home a day later, but I probably would have avoided the giant rainstorm that socked me in on the West Virginia Turnpike. As it was, just as it  turned dark and I paid $1.50 in tolls (and there were two more tolls to come), it started pouring. Then the clouds rolled in so that I was driving in the mountains, through the rain, and in the dark. I put on my hazard lights and slowed down to a crawl, but 18-wheelers kept zipping past, spraying Martha and me with water. The road, slick with rain and tractor trailer oil, looked (and felt) like corrugated cardboard, and Gracie and I bounced our way down the mountain. How ironic that the one road I actually paid extra to drive on was the worst maintained.

I’m glad to say that I arrived that night in Virginia safely but exhausted, with my shoulders up around my ears from four hours of tense driving.

Now that my shoulders have relaxed, I am sorry that I gave into the fear of scarcity when I arrived in Illinois. I know if I had believed in the beauty of abundance that I would have had enough, but fear is a powerful motivator. If only I had remembered this passage from Blue Highways:

But it is man’s potential to try to see how all things come from the old intense light and how they pause in the darkness of matter only long enough to change back into energy, to see that changelessness would be meaninglessness, to know that the only way the universe can show and prove itself is through change. His job is to do what nothing else he knows of can do: to look about and draw upon time. Driving on the blue highways was meant to slow me down so that I could “look about and draw upon time,” but in the remaining hours of my road trip, I forsook that notion in favor of fear. I guess all I can do is to keep traveling down blue highways (both literally and figuratively) and know that I have all that I need.

Mapping

The academic year is over. I have no major complaints. I’m still employed and most of my colleagues are still speaking to me. My night table is stacked with delectable goodies to read, and my TIVO is almost filled to capacity with the past year’s Masterpiece Theatres just waiting for me to submit my final grades.

I have no major complaints except one. I have become a miserably angry person.

I’m two-thirds of my way to tenure, and I think my latest incarnation as miserably angry person, or MAP, is probably fairly common at this stage in my career. The honeymoon is over; I’ve seen the future of my current job, and I keep mumbling to myself a phrase uttered by Mr. Wilcox in Howard’s End: “Oh, the uselessness of it.”

(Such a phrase applies to several situations, though certainly not to my students, who have kept me from going into a bathroom and opening a vein.)

It’s useless to think that I can change the course of the university’s trajectory, it’s useless to think that I can change my colleagues, and, ultimately, it’s useless for me to be miserably angry about it anymore.

This year, my MAP-ping has taken on several forms and more often than not, I leave the campus feeling like Charlie Brown with his forehead against a wall.

But lately, I’ve been seeing things. Or, as I like to think of it, I’ve been shown things. Several nights in a row, I watched five large raptors circle the tops of the trees on the university’s campus, which is just across the street from my apartment. From my balcony, I watched these huge birds swoop and glide above my head.
Jacek came over and declared them to be golden eagles because of the coloring of their wings. I loved watching them soar into the wind, riding thermals (as birders call it). The English professor in me couldn’t help but to see something symbolic in these beautiful animals flying high above my balcony, night after night. Their presence was telling me to fly to new heights and to take pleasure in the ride.

The symbolic birds reminded me of the summer after my first year here. After heavy rains, enormous rainbows perfectly framed the university two evenings in a row. As with the birds, I saw the symbolism and took the rainbows as a sign that I was in the right place.

Then I found out that the birds weren’t golden eagles. They were turkey vultures.

Try as I might, I can’t think of anything positively symbolic about the university and my balcony being swarmed by vultures.

And so, dear reader, I have decided to put my Mini to the wind and get the hell out of Dodge. I’m spending the summer far, far away from the university and the turkey vultures. I’m going home to Virginia.

When I asked my parents about a two-month long visit, they were surprisingly welcoming, given that I’m almost 40 and basically asking for free room and board. And though I’ve made this trip from the Midwest to Virginia more than a few times, Dad sent me his TomTom, a GPS system, for my car.

I’m not one to get caught up in gadgets (I don’t even have a cell phone), but I must admit that the TomTom is pretty cool. And creepy. As I sat in my car, powering up the TomTom, I thought I would have to reprogram it from my Dad’s location in Virginia to mine in Montana, but nope, within about three minutes, six satellites (according to TomTom) found me and pinpointed my exact street location. AND the little car on the screen was a blue MINI Cooper, just like mine. Freaky.

When some friends decided to take a spontaneous jaunt to Butte (about an hour north from Dillon), I packed TomTom with me to get to know him better. After I programmed him to take us to Butte, we hit the highway.

And then TomTom began to moo. I’m really not kidding. TomTom periodically mooed all the way to Butte.

At first, we thought maybe he knew that we were in cattle country and was alerting us to the possible presence of livestock on the road. We also thought since TomTom knew there were few other roads, exits, or communities around that he was mooing to keep us awake.

After returning from Butte, I googled “TomTom moo” and learned exactly why TomTom was mooing. Apparently, TomTom has safety preferences. It only took one phone call to discover the guilty party.
“Dad, did you or did you not program TomTom to moo when I go over the posted speed limit?”

There was only uproarious laughter on the other end of the line.

It turns out that Dad also downloaded the image of the MINI Cooper for my enjoyment, and I was a little relieved to know that the satellites tracking my every move didn’t exactly know what car I was driving.

Since then, I’ve been endlessly fiddling with TomTom trying out different routes home, discovering different POIs (points of interest) on the way, and learning that TomTom is default programmed to take me to any Shoney’s in the country.

As a visual learner, I’ve always loved looking at maps and tracing routes from one place to another. However, I’m easily weighed down by the big picture, the whole trip, all the states to cross.

What I like about TomTom is that he breaks the journey into parts so that I’m not overwhelmed by the whole. He’s helping me trade one MAP for another, one that helps me see the joy in the journey.

Life is Like a Box of Booberry Cereal

When we were growing up, my brother and I weren’t allowed to eat cereal with marshmallows. Every two weeks, Mom would take us to the store, hand us a stack of coupons, and tell us to find cereal that matched the coupons. Shuffling through the stack, I would always pick out Froot Loops, Trix, and Fruity Pebbles, but my brother, ever the cheapo, would make me take the cereal that had the highest dollar savings on its corresponding coupon.

As a result, boxes and boxes of Life cereal traveled through my childhood. Damn you, Mikey!

After high school, I lived in college dorms and subsisted on cafeteria cereal which only ever seemed to include non-confrontational cereals like Raisin Bran and Corn Flakes. So when I moved into my first apartment during grad school, I purchased a box of Lucky Charms just because I could. It was delicious, but an hour later when I was both hungry and wiped out, I realized just why Mom had forbidden such sugary cereal.

But I think there was another reason for making sure we stayed off the junk cereal. Once when I was over at my cousin Leo’s house, I saw a box of Booberry cereal on the kitchen table. Booberry had blue nuggets and marshmallows that turned the milk blue and was therefore, awesome. I exclaimed, “Your mom lets you eat that?!?” Leo nodded proudly as I sank down in my chair. It just wasn’t fair, I thought.

Then Leo’s mom let him go to a KISS concert when he was 10. He became a skater punk who was harassed out of high school and later became one of our town’s first body piercers. But now, years later, cousin Leo is in prison for selling drugs to a local television personality who almost died.

Was it the Booberry cereal that led to his life of crime?

On the flip side, am I who I am because I didn’t eat Booberry cereal when I was a child?

But seriously, I have been thinking a lot lately about those small choices that seem to dictate destiny, especially when it comes to romance.

Recently, I thought about a man I dated during my first year of college. Our relationship only lasted my freshman year, during which time he proposed. There was no ring and we were both pretty tipsy for the event, so I didn’t take it seriously. Then, a few months later, he moved across the country to finish his degree and that was that. I wondered what had happened to him after he left.

Now, I am not one who keeps up with ex-boyfriends with any kind of regularity. After they dump me, and they usually do, I like to pretend that they’ve gone to Siberia where they have no access to modern technology.

Well I do have access to modern technology, and Google is a beautiful, beautiful thing. I typed in his name and BAM, there he was, the subject of a local newspaper story. He had earned degrees in his chosen field and was working for a terrific firm. But the focus of the news story was on people who had survived cancer. Diagnosed with a brain tumor, he had survived numerous surgeries and treatments only, seven years later, to be diagnosed with testicular cancer. I assume he survived that, too, since he keeps an updated Facebook page. He doesn’t appear to be married, and the article indicated that he had been cared for by family members.

Next, I looked up my high school boyfriend. He never proposed and, in fact, dumped me for someone else, but what if fate had intervened to keep us together? Another Google search revealed that he is also living far, far away, working in his chosen field. I couldn’t find out if he is still single; in fact, I couldn’t find any personal information on him at all, which I found sort of interesting. It’s as though he’s disappeared into the black hole of professional life.

I even Googled a boy whom I’d had a mad crush on in high school. Today, he’s a teacher like I am and is living in our hometown. What would have happened had I only managed to convince him of my very existence?

On the other hand, what would have happened to these young men had I stayed in their lives? As far as I can tell, their professional lives weren’t adversely affected by my absence.

Of course, such speculating assumes that romantic relationships affect life and career trajectories. And I suppose they do, I just haven’t had that experience. As I mentioned in a previous column, I always assumed that I would fold my life into someone else’s by getting married, but that situation never presented itself.

Such speculation also assumes that by changing one thing about my life, the rest of my life would have been dramatically different. If cousin Leo hadn’t eaten Booberry cereal every day of his young life, would he still be in prison? Probably. If I had pursued any of these fellas would I still be an English professor in Montana?

Who knows?

Nevertheless, I have decided to tempt fate. I bought a box of Booberry cereal.

It may not lead to a life of crime, but perhaps it will encourage me to keep plugging away at myself, always trying to improve, always re-examining, always moving forward.