I think I'm in love.

Now, like some civilized human, I have a Google homepage, which is basically just another way of saying that as soon as I get on the Internet, I have a bunch of dumb shit waiting for me. But, wait for it, it's dumb shit that I personally selected. Stuff like my horoscope, the weather in the 11215, the date and time (in case all clocks and calendars are broken and/or missing) and, my personal favorite, the Wiki How-Tos.

I'm given two How-Tos every day, and I'm never disappointed. They vary, of course, in their hilarity and their practicality, and while I've never actually done any of the things they're allegedly teaching me HOW to do, some of them seem useful. Have I always wondered how this was done? YES.

The hidden door bookshelf notwithstanding, most of the How-Tos seem excessive to say the least. As a certified life coach for dozens of clients, I can bet that there are some things that I can explain better than the Internet. And yeah, I realize that I'm writing ON the Internet but I don't own a ham radio (YET) so there was no way around that little bit of irony, ass.

* How to tell people you're keeping your maiden name
Easy one: I'm preparing for our inevitable divorce and alleviating myself of some paperwork. Please make sure you buy something ON MY REGISTRY.

* How to lucid dream
Everyone knows these only happen when you're trying to take a nap on a weekend. Or when you've soaked yourself in whiskey.

* How to French Kiss
There is only one way to learn how to do this: by nervously mashing your face against a boy while standing near Minnehaha Creek. Also, by watching Dawson's Creek or Felicity.

* How to sweep and girl off of her feet
Roofies.

If you haven't, then imagine a train filled with people testing their ringtones, shouting into their cell phones, and worst of all, utilizing the walkie-talkie feature on their phone and ignoring the blatant irony that the point of owning a cell phone is really just to make sure you never need to carry a walkie-talkie again.

From our city's only new source.

Pols want MTA cellular service

by michael rundle / metro new york

AUG 13, 2007

MANHATTAN. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority was urged to move forward on introducing cell phone coverage to subways yesterday, with city politicians claiming recent transit chaos should act as a wake-up call.

Wireless coverage could have allowed the MTA to inform riders via text message about delays and other emergencies during last week’s storms, said City Councilman John Liu and U.S. Rep. Anthony Weiner at a press conference outside Penn Station. Introducing underground service also increases ridership and improves safety, they added.

“It makes no sense that there is no minimal means of communicating with riders,” Liu, head of the council’s transportation committee, told Metro. “The MTA have bumped it off their agenda.”

Under current proposals, wireless service would be introduced into 277 underground stations, but not tunnels. The MTA began accepting bids for the project in 2006, but delays have slowed progress. NYC Transit President Howard Roberts said recently that a decision would be made in September, but Liu expressed skepticism.

“The real root of this problem is that the MTA does not see communication as a core competency that it must have,” Liu said.

Liu projected the cost of introducing cell phone coverage at around $300 to $500 million — no small amount considering the budget shortfalls and expensive capital projects on the MTA’s plate already — but said improving communications was “not an optional extra.”

Weiner reintroduced a bill in Congress last month that would require cell phone companies to provide access to emergency telephone numbers while customers were underground.

The MTA did not return calls for comment.

And, maybe most of all, the way he sees me.

A few years ago, my mom and I watched the Disney remake of Freaky Friday. Criminal, I know, but it was awesome. See, they updated it, and Lindsay Lohan? She was in a rock band? And her mom? Her mom was like all uptight and wore ladysuits? And then they switched places? And they understood each other?

My internal timeline is a little messed up, on account of all the boozing (hey, nobody bought ME an alcohol monitoring anklet) but this could have been the summer I went a little wild in the MPLS. See, I had just come back from a semester in London, 6 awesome months spent living in squalor with a pack of boys. Coming and going as I pleased, hopping to different cities in different countries on the weekends, spending my spring break on a train crossing through Switzerland rather than Ft. Lauderdale. Coming home was a shock. My parents wanted to, like, spend time with me. And talk to me. And get to know me. And me? I was TWENTY-ONE YEARS OLD. I was a grown-ass woman. I had beers to drink and dudes to meet and strange couches to pass out on.

And that's how I found myself face-to-face with my mom on a hot summer day, struggling to focus on her while MTV played in the background and I fought the urge to puke up the poison that had settled in my stomach overnight. She was trying to kick me out of the house. Send me back to college early. Out. Enough. Game Over. No room at the inn.

I cried. I promised reform. I think I did end up taking a break to vomit in the bathroom. I went to the gym. I stopped answering my cell phone and spent more nights nestling up to my mother and watching movies.

I am not a beautiful and unique snowflake. I am not special. I'm just a middle-class white girl who did what every middle-class white girl did. We girls go wild. And you know what? So did Lindsay. She just has more means to do so, like the prep school girls in our athletic conference who talked about their coke-fueled weekends like I knew what they were talking about, when really I thought they were talking about the classic coke, the kind in a can.

I'm thankful, really, for parents who give a shit about me. Who aren't going to let me squander millions of dollars on handbags and cars for me to crash. Who aren't going to let me call in sick to work because I'm brutally hungover, who are going to parent me, even at age 24, to make sure I'm not a total fuck-up.

Hamburgers. Ballpark franks. Madge's famous potato salad. Friends. Cupcakes. InStyle. And a boy to man the grill. And the camera.

Did I mention he's a photographer?

Obsessive, yes. Compulsive, always.

But tidy? No, not really.

Since I can remember my life has been a battle with piles of laundry on the floor, with dresser drawers spilling over, threatening to topple the entire bureau, with pairs of shoes shoved under the bed next to spools of thread, old photographs, and unfinished letters.

I've tried to curb this somewhat disgusting habit, taking pains to line up the perfume bottles and knick knacks that accumulate on my dresser, stacking books onto their shelves and tucking old letters into accordian folders. I've owned closet organizers and jewelry boxes galore, spent hours poring over the selection of plastic-things-you-can't-live-without at Organized Living, but no.

No, no. The junk box I've tucked under my desk tips over, revealing an embarrassing collection of tampons, guitar strings and old computer cords. My bathing suits are piled on the floor next to an iron I borrowed from a roommate to make a message tee out of iron-on letters. And yeah, yes I did use the hardwood floor for an ironing board. Old concert tickets and new make-up brushes and vintage dresses and borrowed belts are all holding court on my lovely hardwood floor. Somewhere in there is the extra set of housekeys, replaced before I happened to find them in the bottom of an abandoned purse, then lost again before I could enjoy the luxury of owning two sets of keys.

There have, as I said, been attempts at putting my room in order, all of which seemed to throw my world out of order. I'm not that girl, I realized, who is going to hang the clothing in her closet according to color. Hell, I'm barely a girl who is going to hang anything in her closet at all. I'm not the girl who lines up her knick-knacks and keeps her shoes in anything except a pile on her closet floor. I know those girls, with their immaculate, perfect rooms. Rooms that would make my mother weep for joy, rather than weeping at the fact that I slept in a pile of my dirty laundry knotted up with a bedsheet.

I love those girls, I envy those girls, but I'm a different girl entirely. Here is a girl, my room says, who is too busy enjoying her life to be bothered to change her sheets. A girl too busy balancing social engagements and love affairs to spend her time folding her socks, let alone placing them in a drawer. A girl whose life doesn't fit into closets and drawers and under-the-bed storage units. A girl who likes her life a little messy. Okay, a lot messy. A girl who can't be confined by conventional standards of cleanliness and modern decency, who is perfectly satisfied with a life that is a little unkempt.

Or, my room says, this girl is a fucking pig.

I proposed, naturally, some daytime drinking. It had been awhile since I boozed in the sunlight, over two years I guess, and from what I recalled, it was awesome. My recollections were correct. There is nothing like punctuating your beers with an amazing bacon cheeseburger from the 5th Ave Diner, except of course for watching JD pound TWO burgers while you're stealing fries from your roommate's plate.

It was a bittersweet occasion. Gilmore is gone now. Not across the residential mall, like he was in college. Not in the next bedroom, like he was last summer. Not in another borough like he's been for the past year. He's once again back in the colonies, a Chinatown bus trip away. And I'm a little sad, because now the person who wants to do shit like this with me is no longer just a few miles away.

So once again, our BFFship becomes long distance. For my phone bill, this is horrible. For the past 7 years Dave has been the go-to person for all things Nora. When I need a ride back from the airport, Dave will pick me up even though he's sick as a dog, and proceed to vomit fresh orange juice on his shoes while I laugh hysterically in the passenger seat. When I'm ending a relationship and a cohabitation and need a place to go Gilmore is going to carry all of my earthly belongings on his back and give me the biggest room in his apartment, a room of my own. He's going to write me notes in the morning and have coffee on when I wake up. When I'm at the end of my rapidly fraying rope balancing multiple existential crises? I call my mom. And when she doesn't answer, which she never does, I call Gilmore, who will tell me that no, I have not yet lost my mind, I'm just kind of a sonofabitch.

Saturday night, at the same bar where I was throwing Dave's farewell party, I ran into The Old Boyfriend. It had been ten months since I'd seen him, somewhere on 5th Ave after a horribly awkward lunch, when I disappeared into my office building and pressed up up up up up up hoping the extra pushes would not just make the ancient elevator appear faster, but make it shoot through the roof Willy Wonka style, taking me away from the chaos of those overwhelming emotions, to a place where all of the craziness was over. And apparently that did happen, because as we sat and talked for an hour in that Brooklyn bar, I realized that the great glass elevator had taken ten months, but it had worked. I was right where I had wanted to be ten months ago as I stood in the lobby of my office pressing up up up up up and waiting for the pain to pass.

I'd had a dream some months ago that I had run into the old boyfriend, who had unwittingly showed up to my birthday party in an abandoned warehouse, thrown by people I didn't know and attended almost exclusively by strangers. In the dream, he was with a girl, and she wanted to know why things didn't work out. WELL, I started out, IF YOU REALLY WANT TO KNOW...and rattled through all of the concrete events that had led to our demise. I practically had a PowerPoint with bullet points and venn diagrams, empirical evidence that the problem was him, not me. Halfway through my righteous, vindictive breakup speech, I caught his eye, and something in his look made me see that I was wrong. It wasn't anything that happened, I corrected myself. It doesn't really matter what happened. We were just two people trying to make something work that wasn't going to. That's all.

I woke up from that dream feeling lighter, like an invisible weight had been lifted from my shoulders. It was nobody's fault. It does no good to blame. Forward, forward, always forward.

Saturday night was like that dream, only on crack. Or, more on crack than my normal dreams, which usually involve some form of espionage and often talking unicorns. Whatever weight that had lingered behind was gone, dissolved by a frantic 45 minutes of catching up, of trading stories back and forth, of filling in the gaps in what we had heard through the grapevine about one another. Look at this, I wanted to say, It was necessary, all of those arguments followed by all of that silence. It was all so we could end up like this: both finally moved on, and talking to each other like people.

So that was Saturday. One David wandered back into my life, and another wandered out. Ohio, Minnesota, Los Angeles, Ohio, London, Baltimore, Los Angeles, Ohio, Italy, Baltimore, New York City and Baltimore again. We end up just where we need to be.

Dad: I don't know, probably filing for divorce.

Subject:Unloving Children Alert

Today, as I'm sure you've all forgotten, is your poor mother's birthday. She
is 58 years old, in case you're interested. If you find a spare minute in
your busy days and you wouldn't mind bringing a ray of sunshine into an old
woman's life, you might give her a call or send her an e-mail. After all
she's done for you, is that too much to ask? I'll leave the answer up to you
and your conscience.

Pappy

I soaked it up like a sponge, my vowels getting longer with every minute of conversation, my city stress melting away when I realized, after driving IN A CAR to TARGET that not ONE PERSON had honked their horn, and that, if we so wanted, we could drive anywhere we wanted, be the master of our own Saturday afternoon destiny, rather than slaves to the subway system.

I left sated. Full on beer and Dewey's Pizza and free-standing, big-box retailers. Filled by old friendships and genteel midwestern attitudes. Completely satisfied with my weekend.

I fell asleep at 10,000 feet, Bright Eyes' Cassadaga providing the soundtrack for my semi-lucid, booze-soaked plane dreams.

Everyone must belong somewhere
I know that now that's why I'm staying here

The city spread out beneath me, and I was home.

Lately I've been filled with nostalgia for my drunken youth, smiling blankly on the subway as I recall being pushed down the street in a stolen grocery cart at 2am, or a cafeteria filled with hungover zombies on Saturday mornings, shuffling through the omelet line trying to ease their nausea with hash browns. Staying up late on weeknights to hang out in the honors dorm with the guys, who kept my sarcasm sharp and made sure I was occasionally invited on their adventures to Steak N Shake. Watching Josh pound a Crave Case from White Castle, followed by Poison Control telling me that 30 White Castle burgers constituted a trip to the hospital when I called to ask about giving him ipecac. Working at the Phonathon, pretending to call Alumni for donations but really just laughing hysterically at Bobby Nachos and starting my BFF-ship with Gilmore.

How much I loved our weekends, each indistinguishable from the next in photos except for our rotating low-cut tops and my changing hair color. How good it felt to pretend to be grown-up, living in a frat house filled with girls as inappropriate and filthy as I am, beer cans on the lawn and a bucket of cigarette butts on our porch. An anonymous friend clogging our dorm toilet with a case of explosive diarrhea and vomit. How I pushed myself back into writing, laying in bed on the third floor writing self-indulgent essays while Dailer blared Kelly Clarkson or Ashlee Simpson and I memorized the words. Laying in that same bed at the beginning of May 2005, watching Dailer pack her bags and listening to Maroon 5.

I'm going back to say good-bye to an old friend and usher out the end of an era. It's time to say good-bye to a simpler time, a time when $10 in your pocket was more than enough to buy a pitcher of beer and a list of songs from the jukebox. A time when rich white college kids and locals could sit side by side enjoying pitchers of Ice House, when people could smoke in bars and Camel reps came to pass out free packs and make sure the lowly masses stayed lit up regularly. A time when a girl learned to rely on the Defensive Stance, lest she actually touch the toilet seat and contract Hepatitis.

My memories, my friends, my 4 years of college, they've been on my mind lately.

Plus, I've been missing the men of Norwood. Duh.