I am approaching the bridges I said I would cross when I got to them.

If you've ever driven west on the crosstown, right after France Ave., you may have noticed the sign that says Hwy 100, 1 mile. Then, you may notice that about 1/8 of a mile later, there is another sign that says Hwy 100, 1 mile.

As you may have guessed, this drives me fucking crazy. Which is it, MnDot? Which of the two same signs is exactly 1 mile away from MN 100?

You may think that one of the signs is 1 mile away from the North exit, and the next sign is a mile away from the South exit. But they are not clearly labeled, so if you think this, you're wrong. And this is especially unnerving in gridlock traffic. I creep along MN-62. I'm under the 1 mile sign. I'm like yes. I'm almost home. Then 15 minutes later, I'm under another sign that says Hwy 100, 1 mile. It's a sadistic Groundhog Day-esque experience.

***
I'm stressed. I'm stressed even when I'm not stressed, and there is a little part of my brain that screams stress!-stress!-stress!-stress! and flashes red lights behind my eyes when I'm trying to think about not being stressed. It's just the work, and moving this weekend, and the boxes in my living room and the pages in my website writing queue, and an interview tomorrow, and money, and my typical obsessive thoughts about where furniture goes in rooms, things I need to buy, and accounts I need to cancel.

Luckily, I've taken off Friday this week, but instead of being a real day off it will instead be a day of re-packing all of my things into boxes and driving them to Minneapolis. Then on Saturday, I will officially move, and then clean, clean, clean, and then instead of unpacking and feeling comfortable in my new home, I will spend the night at the Good Doctor's new place because Liz is gone and I'll be scared to be alone. Then Sunday, I will spend the day at the fair, eating, eating, eating, not unpacking, not writing sites, and also probably wondering about the results of the interview, and on Monday I will go to Ikea and spends hundreds of dollars and hopefully finally unpack and feel like I live somewhere that I know I'll be living for awhile. Plus, Liz and I have already painted the walls cream, and my room a brown color exactly the same shade as chocolate pudding.

***
At work today I got a mini-lecture from an editor regarding my run-on sentences and overuse of a word that was consensually voted as "just not it" by other editors. I find my roles of writer and editor interesting. As an editor, a teacher, I'd be thoroughly annoyed by comma splices. I might say something like what the fuck, dumbass! Of course you don't use a comma in a non-compound sentence! Get your poop in a group! And as a writer, I'm like: don't have time to proofread, don't care, fuck you, you fix it, that's what editors are for. I, can you believe it?, am not even ashamed. I think it is near impossible to be a successful writer and editor of your own work. I am good both at being anal and being creative, but never, ever at the same time. It's like mixing white wine and red wine. Individually, delicious! But together? At the most, you'd get a really nasty blush.

Soon this split-personality summer will come to an end. School started in Mankato this week for old students, old colleagues. For the first time in 19 years, I didn't have to be there. For the first time, I had no obligation, no notebooks, no night-before-school anxiety. And nobody cares that I'm not there. Nobody showed me a syllabus, nobody asked me about my attendance policy, nobody invited me to sit in a semi-circle of dirty plastic desks in a too-cold room, only to come out into the humid August air wishing for a tall beer and feeling so-ready to talk about the happenings of the upcoming year, nobody needed me to console them about their first-day teaching jitters, nobody talked to me about any poem or prose or book.

Nobody said hey, where's Jean? Doesn't she belong here?

And I find out that all along, I've been taking these Thursdays for granted.

Tony, Tony, Tony, Tony, Tony, Tony, Tony, Tony, Tony, Tony, Tony, Tony, Tony, Tony, Tony, Tony, The Tony Sims Band.

Is leaving in November.

And for the first time in a long time, I feel very compelled to write again. That's it, Tony Sims Band. You're getting (another) essay.

Or, you could just not go.

Uh-oh. It's getting all fall-y.

I spent the majority of this past weekend on the couch, with the windows open, downloading classical music, and reading short stories.

Well, I mostly slept on the couch. And I made some banana bread and it made the house warm. This rainy, chilly, but-not-too-cold weather is the best. I went for walks in the mist. I wore sweatshirts and put hoods over my head. I wore socks. I love wearing socks. It's like sweatshirts for your feet! (When I told the Good Doctor how much I loved wearing socks, he told me that it was gay.)

I snuggled with Ryan, Lance, and Shannon in the rain, while we stood in a long line for ice cream. Just like old times.

I know it's going to get hot again, summer isn't over. Nor should it be. But don't you want to watch football and sniff your school supplies before you organize them very neatly, and perhaps alphabetically in your backpack? I do.

Soon, I will prepare for my move to South Minneapolis. I've been avoiding it up until now, leaving the boxes in the garage. But by the end of this week I'll have to start driving over-stuff boxes down 35W. I may go to Home Depot to buy brown paint for my bedroom. I have even been looking at couches online, and deciding which one might be the best for me to purchase. And by "purchase," I mean "charge to my credit card."

So far, I think I've been successful at managing this convulted schedule of literature and market copy. I spend two days a week sipping mint tea at my desk at Graywolf, reading literary magazines, and the slushpile, and sending desk copies of books around the country. It's wonderful. I spend the rest of the week in another office, sipping coffee with too-much-sweetner to make it drinkable, whipping through pages and pages of market copy in order to minimize my workload for the weekend. Weeks go by slow, but they're tolerable. It's just the big shift in the middle. I thought, originally, it'd be like: I only have a 3 day week! But, um. No. It's not like that at all. Tuesday feels like Friday, and Wednesday feels like Monday, and I sort of feel like I am two people. It's impossible to think of one job while doing the other.

Tonight I taught Kristin's class. Good kids. Funny fucking kids. They read Tony Hoagland and wrote about gas station bathrooms.

I went to go look at a house with the Good Doctor yesterday, a lakeshore property in Maple Grove. Can you imagine, waking up to a lake in your backyard everyday? Sipping hot drinks at the edge of your dock? Swimming and boating and a fire pit? Having a good place to weigh down and store all of those dead bodies that are stinking up your basement?

It's been a long day.

I am not kissing either of them.

Last night, because I am so cool (so cool, in fact, that it is impossible to fathom how cool), I wrote websites at work for eight hours, and then went home to write websites for four more hours.

Meanwhile, The Good Doctor came home for a couple of minutes after work, and then went out to look at large homes with Brazilian cherry wood floors with his gay realtor. He came home four hours later, around the time I was done tapping away about liquor liability laws. Then he looked for his pager for the next 2 hours, while I half-looked and then went to bed.

Clearly, an exciting night.

Then, around eleven, I heard the door to my room creak open (I have no lock, nor privacy) and sat up to find The Good Doctor standing over me with his arm extended, giggling. Then, he screamed and started frantically moving my covers around to find out where it went.

Then I screamed and jumped and wondered where it went. The Good Doctor laughed, I scolded. He flipped back the corner on my red comforter, and a fat, warty, circle of toad croaked at me. I said, You put a frog in my bed! Are you kidding me? Toad pee!

The Good Doctor scooped up the toad and cupped it in his hand and then pet his gray, crinkled head with one finger. He's cute honey! Look at him! They're everywhere outside!

And that is where they should stay. The Good Doctor, laughing, and occasionally screaming as the toad jumped down, or up, brought the toad back outside. I crawled into his bed, in his room, and locked his capable-of-locking door.

The night before, after I'd gone to bed, he snuck in around midnight and screamed boo! and proceeded to gay-ly attack my half-sleeping self. Then, a couple of weeks ago, there was that "water fight," which consisted of him dumping his cold Dasani down the front of my shirt after screaming "water fight!" as though it was license to do so, even though I was unarmed. And then there was that other "water fight" with the kitchen sink sprayer.

I must say, though, it's at least an adventure. Anything to break up the week. I am, I have to say, charmed.

Reflections on adulthood (or another title that makes it sound as though I am the brown/gray-bob-hairdoed author of a post-menopausal book)

Lately, I've been battling youth and age.

I don't mean age in the sense of 25. Age is just time gone by. But I mean this part of my life where school is done, summer is ending, and I'm waking up at 6:30 a.m. only to listen to a radio morning show and looking before changing lanes in Minneapolis rush hour traffic. So sometimes, when my alarm goes off and I put on nice shoes and lock the door before I leave, I feel old. And other times, such as today when I'm on an important phone call and thinking about how interesting it would be if there was a law against farting in public (much like the smoking ban) and one could call it flatulence law, I feel entirely young. I am the youngest person in the office, and sometimes I'm afraid it shows. Then other times I think hey, I'm the youngest, and I'm still pulling this shit together.

Graywolf, which I love, started officially last Wednesday and went into practice today. Working there makes me miss X and P, mostly regarding literary discussions or hanging inappropriate submissions of artistic photos of a naked woman on the piano/poems about a naked women on a piano--on the wall. I feel young and old at Graywolf too: old when I'm the oldest of all the interns, who are mostly undergraduates who ask who Robert Pinsky is; young when I am the only intern in the office sharing white wine and cupcakes (that's right, white wine and cupcakes, delicious, gourmet cupcakes) and am asked if I am old enough to drink and wish I had first home or first child stories to share.

Ah, strange. I am adult in the working sense of the word, but at the bottom of corporate ladders and such--merely a contract writer, not fulltime; merely an intern who is paid (happily paid) in damaged books and white wine and cupcakes. It is odd to get paychecks weekly, paychecks that pay for things such as student loans and gas and hummus. Sometimes I forget they are coming. Sometimes I wonder what adults do with paychecks--maybe use them to buy luxuries such as leather pants, 3-ply toilet paper, or wooly steering wheel covers--or maybe they put them in these things called "savings accounts" that the kids down the street have been whispering about. I am still living paycheck to paycheck, and new things, such as car insurance, an overwhelming electric bill, or alcoholic beverages, stop me from saving. Not adult.

Then other days, I find that I am picking up after myself or looking up recipes online and making my own tomato sauce. Adult. (Adult-ish). Humph.

David is in Phoenix for the week, pretending to be a doctor, and I feel weird in this house by myself. The walls are thin and I keep thinking there's someone downstairs, when it's just the neighbors humping the wall, or whatever they do over there. The good thing is that with him gone and unable to distract me with the temptations of renting movies and doing nothing, that I've been able to get back into the running routine that I happily abandoned at the beginning of summer. A word of warning to runners: it is desperately easy to get out of shape, and the act of turning yourself out of the heaping pile of ugly and fat you feel like you've become is not easy. There are hills.

Last week, in a really old Mary Oliver moment, David and I saw a deer on the bike path. We'd just got done riding our bikes to the sculpture garden. I was complaining about how bad the bike seat had hurt my crotchal region, he was riding 10 feet in front of me, and then a teenage deer crossed in front of us. David turned to me and we both blew spitty shhhhs! through our index fingers and pulled over. The deer didn't run, which I appreciated. He just poked his nose around in the grass, stayed close enough to touch (but of course, if I'd tried, he'd have run away) and occasionally watched us watching him, just like a puppy who is about to pee on the rug or do some other naughty puppy thing. Head down, peek, head up, head down. He was young, strong, and beautiful. I love this state and love even more evenings after work.

Nonetheless, I've still spent this summer constantly not feeling old enough and at the same time feeling so old. This has nothing to do with the deer, nor is the deer a metaphor. The deer is the deer. I'm just saying, that's all.

An Open Letter to the future tenants at 1224 Highland Ave.

Dear future tenants at 1224 Highland,

Foremost, congratulations on signing your lease. That is, if you signed one. There is a chance that instead of signing a lease you were just instructed to show up one day when someone would be there to make sure everything went okay. Nobody will be there. You will not get a key, you will have to wait a couple of weeks for a parking pass, and it will take you awhile to get used to the neighbors. They have a black Taurus parked in front of their house, and it will make you think that Chad is always visiting because he has the same car. Unfortunately, it never is Chad.

X ws the one who found you. Once upon a time, before my time, a man with a gun sat in your living room. His gun, as I have heard, went click, click with empty rounds. He kept the house hot, so the air was heavy and could force out winter. Soon thereafter, a penguin moved into his room. She was the love of my life. The house, although it loved her, was somewhat unkind. Bugs attacked, and whatnot.

Something is broken. Right now, I don't know what that something is, but I assure that you will find out in a couple of weeks. Something will break. During our stay, we lost a door, a kitchen sink, the bathroom sink, the toilet, the air conditioner for a couple of days, the washing machine for awhile.

And don't even consider, for one second, that the dishwasher is more than just a pretty thing to look at. As far as I know, that lazy bitch hasn't washed a thing in her life.

When X was cleaning out the refrigerator, she found a leaf on the bottom shelf. It was old and crunchy. Isn't that odd? Ha! A leaf!

Maybe you're wondering who those people are above the stove. It might be better not to question. Perhaps, instead you should invent stories about those people. Like they were once in a traveling band. Or they are great inventors of the 20th century. Yeah, that's it.

The garbage goes out on Thursday mornings. This is after the nights where you all should gather for dinner under the yellow kitchen lights and eat leftover crusts of cheesebread while debating trivial pursuit questions. It is after Writer's Bloc, too, if that helps.

Watch out for the woman across the street. When you park in the driveway, make sure not to have a single part of your tire in the grass, or you'll get a ticket. She will call and tell on you. Shoveling the driveway is hell, especially since you don't have a real shovel. When the neighborhood kid comes over and asks if he can shovel it for you, say "yes" as quickly as possible and give him a large tip.

The stairs are gross.

The basement likes to pretend it's a pool. Look out for the smell and the mold when it rains, when snow melts, when anything happens.

If you live upstairs and notice that blonde hair is forever sewn into your rug, as though it's part of the design, don't even attempt to vacuum it up. It's just there forever. So are the little white dog hairs that you will forever continue to find. They're just part of that house now.

The bathroom wasn't always yellow. Try to picture a day when once it was light green and white, had a certain charm, and when, after cleaning, looked like it had once been normal or that parents had once felt comfortable bathing their children in the tub. Yes, there is, for some God awful reason, an air conditioning vent in the shower. Don't even ask. In winter, prepare to be really fucking cold.

Speaking of the bathroom, the house has magical powers. When you look at certain parts from squinty eyes and certain angles, it looks like it could somehow be a clean house. In order to survive, you will need to have this feeling every once in awhile. The next day, the house will be dirty, and will seem impossible to clean. It is.

While us writers lived there, we considered ourselves geniuses and we considered ourselves useless. There were days when we woke up in the middle of the night and ran to our desks to write the world, and days when we walked through blowing snow at 9 at night with workshop tears in our eyes. Highland watched it all. Highland had no choice but to hold us on those days, to be home, to be the one place we could go and let it all out.

Look at most of our pictures, and there is Highland. The photo on the front porch before the ball of twine, every Highland host photo in the kitchen, the red paint behind every living room photo. There's Highland. Amazing how it was just there all the time, while we kept moving and changing and growing and loving and hating and writing more and more and more abstratctions. We became teachers in that house, stopped being students in that house.

I don't think the house has any magic powers. Or if it did, we certainly sucked it dry. The day that I helped X clean was what most people call "a scorcher." The house had petered out, and we didn't go with a bang. I think we exhausted it. I don't know what it has in it anymore. It's not white anymore. We took it through its thirties, and now its in mid-life crisis mode.


New renters, I don't know if we will ever meet, but something tells me that we might. Perhaps someday. Perhaps when we all file a class action suit against the landlord for the black mold we've inhaled over the years or realize that the oven somehow made us all infertile, we will meet and share Highland stories. It used to be the baseball house, you know.

Truman lost his virginity in that house. Take care of it, will ya?

Love,

Jeano

P.S. Watch out for the moths.

Yikes. It's. Devastating.

Minnesota is getting international recognition for its amazing response-in-an-emergency. Thank God, in the tradedy, we got it right.

All of mine, as far as I know, are okay.