The flood.

On the bus home from work today, I found the only seat next to a large black man who was wearing a leather fringe coat, black and white striped chef-type pants, and a bowler hat with a red and orange withered feather in it. He had gray side burns and a fat head, and he took up 3/4 of the bus seat while sitting with his legs spread far apart as though he was about to give birth.

This was the man I was to sit next to while crying on the bus, while crying in public, while doing everything I could to not cry, but not being successful.

It's amazing how different bus rides home can be. How different things can look. Last Wednesday, I was sitting good, looking forward to the holiday and black Friday, still my favorite day of the year even with no money. This Monday, I found out that my bedroom had quite literally flooded and that nearly everything I own has a piss/mold stench to it.

Our water heater broke.

Liz called me on Friday saying that there had been a puddle in the basement and that we had no hot water. I called the landlady, who went over to our house to assess the damage, as Liz had just left town and I was gone all weekend. She turned off the water. She didn't go into my basement bedroom to see if anything had gotten wet.

I stayed at David's last night, so I could have a shower in the morning before work. I went home before catching the bus, went into my room to put some things away, and stepped into a wet, disgusting carpet. Everything was soaked. The surface area of my room is huge, and the water found its way into everything--clothes on the floor, books, especially rugs, my guitar and case, my dresser and bookshelves and shoes. The entire floor was/is covered.

This morning, I cried and cried. It had been like that since Friday. And it smelled horrible.

I grabbed the rugs and threw them into the laundry room, but there wasn't much more I could do before I had to catch the bus. I texted Liz, who met with the landlord who was coming to install the new water heater. Liz saved some of the important documents I had sitting on the floor--my teaching evals that I was hoping to put into a portfolio--and she moved my dresser.

When I emailed the landlord from work, he wrote me back to say: I have a fan and dehumidifier downstairs. I don't know what you mean by the "smell" down there. It just smells like the new carpet.

No, it doesn't. It smells like wet nastiness. New carpet smells like piss and mold? Are you kidding me, sir?

I'm not even sure what to do. That just made me cry and cry and work (this is surely becoming habit, now, isn't it?) and then cry on the bus ride home. When I got home, before coming to David's again because I can't stand the smell of the house, I pulled all of my books off of their shelves and pulled the bookcases out of my room. I gagged at the "new carpet" smell. The fans do nothing. I've suggested a carpet cleaning, which will soon turn into a demand (I'm already 'out' of my room for at least a week), although my dad has suggested that the only thing to really get rid of the mold is replacing the carpeting.

And I finally got the stink out of the fucking room from when I moved in. I was comfortable there. It was my room.

The bottoms of my bookshelves have water damage of at least two inches, rugs bled into clothes fabric, clothes fabric bled into each other. And the landlord thinks fans are going to fix it. I don't know if my new bedroom set will make it. If it does, I don't know what it will look like; if the wood will be warped, if the smell will ever go away.

And on the bus ride home, while I was crying silently and hating myself for crying, I knew the man next to me was going to say something. I was waiting for it, but I didn't know what it was going to be. I mean, somebody had to say something. They were all staring at me, wiping tears, the top of my lip getting all red, my nose dripping. Say something, stranger, I thought. Say something.

And he said, bad day, huh?

Yup.

It'll be alright. Everything's gonna work out, he said.

Hope so. Hope so.

You got a cold or something?

Nope. Just crying, I said.

It's gonna work out. You just gotta have faith. Just gotta have faith.

And these words made me lose it even more. I was caught between wanting to run away from wanting to bury my head in this stranger's black fringe leather cowboy coat--and literally, as I was on the bus, I couldn't physically go anywhere. So I bit my lip hard, because faith, I thought, is just about what I've given up on. I'm running on faith fumes right now. Much like the gas fumes my car runs on because I can't afford to fill it up. You can most certainly run out of faith fumes. You need to find something to fill up your faith tank.

Dear Friends,

You were with me on the ride home today. The whole time. The reasons are as follows:

• Today, the Wednesday before the Thanksgiving holiday, I left my tall building downtown to walk into the first real snowfall of the season. Snow in the city is equally as beautiful as the quiet snow in the country. The buildings make the sky seem higher, and instead of "falling," the snow dances around as though it's in a snowglobe that never settles. In fact, at times it seems as though it's falling up. Once I got away from the buildings and into the residential area of south Minneapolis, the effect stopped and the snow simply fell. I feel as though this, too, is something that you would have noticed.


• I read an essay about "homes" on the bus from a book of essays dedicated entirely to the concept of home.


• Everyday on the north side of Chicago Ave., the bus drives by a sign on a building--I don't know what the building is--that has a picture of a carrot holding a gun. I'm serious. It looks like this:

You would've said, is that a CARROT holding a gun? What? Why? And I would've said, that's why not eating your vegetables will kill you.

Thanks for joining me on the ride home, guys. You, and the snow in the city is exactly what I needed today.

Operation: Bake.

There's only so much a girl can take.

How many times do I get to say that before I really lose it? I wonder.

I was promised to start a temporary position Monday, as in 2 business days from now. I even practiced the bus with Liz today! I walked around my giant downtown building in preparation for Monday morning, when I would finally be bringing in a happy little thing called a paycheck. I even took myself out for a couple of glasses of wine last night and listened to Tony and Dave play a stellar piano/acoustic duo. I even wrote down fragments in a little notebook, accepting myself into this life where I ride the bus and really don't like my job but put up with it because I have no other options. I was all ready to be a different kind of miserable.

And, well, I still get that. But not for another week. I was all ready to write a post called: Well, unemployment, it's been fun but Pro Staff just called me to let me know that I don't get to start until next week, meaning the 19th, meaning a 3-day week. And then a full week, and then November is fucking over.

Guess how much I want to stay at home next week. Guess. Not at fucking all. I'm still running out of money, I get very little hours at the bookstore, and if I do take hours at the bookstore, it compromises my chances of getting a one-day-temp day of work, which Pro Staff has agreed to look for really hard when it came to getting me work next week. Yes. I bet they will, oh I just bet they will.

Why.

I'm sitting in the green chair, and I've been whining to a very understanding Liz--oh, what the hell would I do without her? Well, I'd get lost downtown after taking the wrong bus, I'd be ever so lonely, I'd burn pumpkin bread in the oven--who has agreed that it's really a blessing in disguise. Maybe I'll get that killer interview next week and not have to tell work I "can't come in for part of the day" during my first week. Maybe I'll write something amazing and it will get published, like, the next day. Maybe I'll have time to apply for that job I wouldn't have found otherwise.

Or maybe I'm just getting fucking fucked over again. Maybe this shit never ends, and this is what fucking life is. Broken promises, waiting for something you don't even fucking really want but have no choice to take. Like, when I'm single and alone at 40, waiting all my life for a hint of a relationship, and having to settle for a guy who wears black briefs because you don't have to wash them as much because they don't look dirty.

Someone please kill me now.

All after the big book hunt.

For the second time in two weeks, I found myself last night on the side of a major Minnesota interstate with the cherries of a cop flashing behind me.

Oh yes, friends, it never ends.

I've done (nor did) nothing wrong. I was driving home to my parents' house, from work (!), along I-94. And all of a sudden, a police officer (an arch nemesis) who was going East crossed in a U-turn to go West. I was in the fast lane, not speeding, and he was driving next to me on the shoulder, freaking me out. I mean, he'd turned so fast that I was certain he didn't see me and was going to cut in front of me to do whatever he was doing. Was he catching a speeder? Reporting to an accident? Trying to look important?

And because I was scared, I slowed down, to let him get in front of me. I didn't slow down too quickly--didn't slam on the breaks--but apparently it was a quick enough slow-en-ing that the lady behind me slammed into the back of the Intrepid. The Intrepid, who last year was slammed-into-the-back-of, whose driver's side mirror was hit a couple of weeks ago while I was in a coffee shop, who sped down I-35W a couple of weeks ago to get a ticket.

I wasn't expecting to be hit. I heard the familiar smash (or is it crunch?) of car on car. I sighed. That's all. Just a soft sigh. I was still in front of the cop, so I pulled over. I was shaking a bit, and my neck sort of hurt, but it wasn't that bad. It just felt like the last time I was rear-ended. And the cop got out, I rolled down my window, and in accusatory tone he asked: What are you doing?

And I said: excuse me? I was just hit! I was just in an accident!

And he said: Really, oh man, I'm sorry, I didn't see any of that. Then he looked behind his car to see that the other person in the accident had pulled up behind his car. I asked to get out and look at the damage.

He said, oh, wow, it looks like she put a hole in there.

I explained that was an old hole. Otherwise, there was no damage. So Officer Pretty-Much-Caused-the-Accident talked to the lady who hit me for about 15 minutes, then came to tell me that she had no damage to her car and that he wasn't filing an accident report. Then he gave me his card and told me to call him if I found any damage or if I was sore in the neck tomorrow. I drove away, a little sore, but I assumed it'd be fine.

And today I was fine, although just shaken. Like what happens after any accident. I'd talked to the Good Doctor, who is at a seminar in Phoenix, on the phone last night. He seemed to be freaked out. He said, things keep happening to you. What the hell. You need to stop driving. These are signs. You're going to get in a really bad accident.

I'd have been mad at him for saying it, but I sort of felt the same way. Somehow, I've been waiting for a bad accident to happen. I can't explain it. It's sort of sick. I imagine getting side-swiped by semis while driving 60, I imagine getting t-boned in intersections and the metal of my car twists. Like I'm out-of-body and watching myself get hurt from above, like those car insurance commercials where you don't expect it coming. I hope these images stop soon. Especially while I'm driving, because that just turns into a catch 22. Would it happen simply because I was thinking about it?

Um, am I going to die?

Because I finally got a job. It's a temporary Christmas job, and it's at Barnes & Noble, which I've decided isn't job-like at all. It's just hanging around a bookstore for 15 hours a week, which if I had money I'd do anyway. Nights and weekends while I work a more full-timeish job that I have with a temp agency client tomorrow. This possible temp job is not an exciting job, and to be honest, I'm not sure if it's a job I will enjoy, but it pays money and that's what I need. Especially while I pray that the eight jobs that I really want call me back. So: ideally, I work there for a couple of weeks, make money to pay bills, pay my parents back, pay, pay, pay. Then someone will call me and say: interview! And I will say: when and where! And then we'll meet when and where and they'll say: hired!

Yesterday was my first day of training at Barnes & Noble, and it went well. Except for the woman I trained with. I was hoping for, maybe, a sexy male English Grad, but I got Vivian the 50-year-old-smoker with linty gray pants. She was nice enough, but because she was older (as often happens when I am working with older persons who are on the same "level" as me) she began to act like she was training me. This went on for four hours while I became annoyed, yet quiet, yet flashing half-smiles at her when we made eye contact, as though I wasn't annoyed at all. When we did the "book hunt" activity--pretty self-explanatory, a means of learning the organization of the store--we worked together. We didn't have a choice.

I suggested we use the computer to search for some of the books. After all, it wasn't stated that we couldn't use the computer, and it seemed to be the best means of finding what we needed to find. Vivian was apprehensive: I don't know if we can do that! But we did look a couple of books up, then found them on the floor, then carried on with the activity. When the manager came to check up on how we were doing, Vivian asked: are we allowed to use the computer?

Manager said: Of course you can!

Vivian then nudges me in the arm, in front of the manager and says: told you so! Told you we could use them!

Um. Excuse me.

Thanks for making me look like a dick in front of the manager. Thanks a ton. All I could do was shrug and make a I-have-no-idea-what-she's-talking-about-face. I think the manager got it. But who does that?

Anyway, things are in the midst of change. Aren't they always? Is it November? Graywolf ended, so sadly, on Wednesday. I spent Halloween night (because the Good Doctor had food poisoning) watching my mom hand out Halloween candy to young kids who screamed: are you Travis' mom! At her. I played with Travis' trombone and told him he was making the biggest mistake in his ten years of life by considering quitting band. I took his trombone and taught him "Hot Cross Buns." I beat his version of Guitar Hero III on Easy. I found a motherfucking centipede in my room and considered turning the living room into my bedroom. I still feeling like bugs are crawling, crawling, plotting, crawling. I'm am constantly happy and constantly in a devastating depression all at once, worried about money, exicted about the holidays, feeling at home in Minneapolis and also feeling nowhere near.