The one in which Rachel rambles on about elevators

I spend a lot of time in elevators. Enough time to realize I’m lucky. Enough time to Photoshop the latest M. Night Shyamalan movie poster to embody the descent into horrors that happens on a cursory elevator ride in my building (all images represent actual views of floors in my building from within the elevator).

You get in on the 9th, press the greasy cold button, and then, BAM! Someone on the 7th needs to get on and as the elevator doors swoosh open to reveal lumpy carpeting and wrinkled walls, you gasp in horror and think to yourself:

“I am lucky to not work on this floor. Very lucky indeed.”

You may actually say this out loud as well.

I have an interesting relationship with elevators. For one thing, it stretches pretty far back – all the way back to age 11 when my family moved from a first floor to a seventh.

You begin to appreciate elevators when you live on a seventh. You also begin to hate them.

Our 20+ year old building was like a dignified Englishman who daily smokes a pipe: stately on the outside, rotten on the inside. Unfortunately, in our case, the rotting extended to the elevator shafts. This led to multiple breakdowns and stalls (with and without people stuck inside). This also led to much huffing and puffing up seven flights of stairs. Even on grocery day.

Maybe my Mom had a hunch early on that she would live in a building with a moody elevator. Exploiting your four children as pack llamas certainly cuts down on the number of grocery runs up seven flights of stairs.

Besides the occasional breakdown, there was also the issue of moving. How do you fit a couch into an elevator? Or a bed? You don’t. That’s when you hope you have a lot of friends with the brute strength to lug a couch up seven flights. Because four whiny kids just don’t cut it.

Going for a bicycle ride in the potted courtyard below also presented a unique challenge. You learn at a tender age to hoist your bike onto its back wheel and imprison yourself behind it within the elevator (going against every instinct of survival in your body). Which makes for an awkward – albeit strangely intimate – ride down should any other apartment dweller climb into your elevator by chance.

This is when the art of “elevator talk” comes in handy. This ever-polite, pause-infused, head-nodding mode of speech becomes your sole defense mechanism as you feebly wave hello from behind the bike wheel. It’s that or pretend to deeply contemplate the grease on your chain. Like that fools anybody.

At least you can rely on an elevator for discretion.

On one particularly hot summer day in ’99, I decided to take “Oso,” the yellow lab we were dog-sitting, on a jaunt around the potted courtyard. I had the spent my morning lounging on the sofa with a book, oblivious to the heat waves flickering over the sidewalk outside. Oblivious to my body’s need for water.

After shuffling after Oso as he made his “rounds,” I sluggishly pulled him into the elevator to go back up. I remember leaning against the cool metallic panel of the elevator. And then I don’t remember anything else. Somewhere between floors 4 and 5 I fainted. When I woke up, I was on the floor. The elevator doors were opening. And Oso looked mournfully on.

At least, with a dog there is no need for “elevator talk.”

The one in which Rachel's eyes let her down

My eyes carry a heavy burden. And I’m not referring to the weight of the glass suspended between my pair of outdated frames.

No. In my family, poor vision is regarded as a competitive sport. And we can be ruthless.

Prescriptions are meticulously discussed (blue eyes winning out over brown due to their enhanced sensitivity to light). Epic narratives of contact lenses lost to sinks, tubs and…toilets, reach legendary proportions. Unspoken rites that involve reusing the same pair of contacts/glasses for supernatural stretches of time become de rigeuer. And no one blinks an eye.

We are a clan of lumbering, half-blind Browns. But we are proud of it. And we have my Dad to thank.

I remember the time my Dad ran the “Sound to Narrows Run” in Tacoma, Washington. This 12k run winds the runner up and down Tacoma’s hilly streets and plunges him into Point Defiance’s Jurassic Park-like foliage. This run causes your calves to scream.

The roller-coaster terrain didn’t do my Dad in. Oh no. It was the eyes. Somewhere around the 4k mark, one of his contact lenses popped out onto the gravel course. Just like that. But the man remained unfazed.

Ever aware of the clock, he paused to scoop up the missing contact and then proceeded to spit into the palm of his hand to wipe off any gravel specs. He then plunked it back into place. In his eye. It was a “Jesus giving sight to the blind by rubbing spit and mud in the eye” moment. Only do-it-yourself style.

That’s my childhood legacy. Stories like those. Retellings of my Dad duct taping his frames back together (thus, was the utilitarian Brown spirit). And you thought this was something that only existed within the teen comedy genre. For the Brown children, it was reality.

And continues to be. When one of my contact lenses flared up on a trip to Amsterdam this past summer, I did what any good Brown child knows to do. I removed the offending contact and placed it in a trusty spot: in this case, my Dad’s water bottle. My rationale? The water would keep the contact sufficiently hydrated within an enclosed container. I then gave the water bottle back to my Dad with clear instructions to “not drink from it.”

I was tempting fate. Back at the hostel that evening, I soon realized that my Dad had, indeed, “drunk from it." Half of the water was gone.

As I stared in disbelief, my ever practical mother suggested we inspect the bottle for the rare possibility that the contact had managed to survive my Dad’s gulps. Survived it had. And in hydrated form too. Less than a minute later it was back in my eye – now positively refreshed.

What can I say? I’m shameless.

It wasn’t until this past week that I realized how far of a goner I was. When my right eye sprouted a scramble of inflamed red veins, I did nothing. I simply removed the offending contact lens to soak it and went about my day – with only one good eye. I did this for 3 days: only occasionally bumping into protruding edges and corners.

My roommate advised me to throw it out. "What? And waste a perfectly good contact"? Had all my father's lessons been in vain?

Not quite. I did remove the musty contact and replace it with a new one. But I couldn't bring myself to throw it out. Not yet. So there it sits among a jumble of shower products. Awaiting the day I muster the courage to pop it back in – should I be in a pinch.

That, or the day my Dad somehow manages to accidentally swallow it.

The one in which Rachel does the walk of shame (but not THAT walk of shame)

It started the way these things always do. With bites. Multiple ones, mapping an imaginary line down the body.

When my roommate Bri told me a collage of itchy splotches had cropped up on her petite frame, I did what any good New Yorker does: I clammed up. Told no one. I even started taking calls from my work lobby – fearful that zealous cubicle mates would overhear my drawn out conversations with the Tony the exterminator and Jack, “Papa Gullo,” my semi-deaf landlord.

There’s a reason a Google search for “bedbugs social stigma” generates over 12,800 results (including one LA Weekly blog post titled “Bedbugs Finally Outnumber Hipsters in New York City”). Bedbugs in the home get you on the fast track to becoming a social pariah. It outperforms drugs, divorces and other salacious bits of gossip. And drives open, unguarded people, like me, to secrecy (cue the eerie soundtrack).

Bedbugs may just be the 2010 post-“Signs” version of an alien invasion (substitute the crop circles for bug bites). It becomes about survival – only in this case, survival of the social kind. Soon, you realize one thing. What goes on underneath your mattress is strictly between you and your landlord.

So what’s a girl to do?

After the initial shock wore off (I may have gone through all 7 stages of grief within 30 seconds flat), I did what any new lessee does: call the landlord. But Jack was not so obliging. He insisted my roommates and I were responsible. The bedbug(s) had to come in on someone's back, right?

Still reeling in disbelief, I called Tony the exterminator and set up an appointment. In the meantime, my roommates and I madly scoured the web, searching for any information on tenant rights (for more info, go here). I continued to harass Jack -- even calling him on the eve of a family wake. And I continued to keep it a secret.

Finally, B-Day rolled around. At 8:30 AM sharp, I got the call and ran downstairs. That's when I met Tony & Harry, two mealy looking specimens in overalls, who clomped up the stairs into my life.

I led them to the back room. They flip-flopped the mattresses, whipped out insanely small lasers, and "oohed" and "ahhh'd" as they scrutinized our sheets. It was a strangely intimate scene. I almost died when Tony cried out, "there's a piece of their vomit!" Any social aspirations drew their last breath.

But then it got better. In this case, better meant no rust-colored blood spots on our mattresses. Better as in no bedbugs. Not a single one. Anywhere.

Six hours later, I'm still not sure what to make of the ordeal. Was it was a fake out? A freak out? Are the bedbugs regrouping before one last, final invasion? Maybe Bri's bites were caused by mosquitoes. Maybe she just has sensitive skin.

For now, I don't really care to find out. I'm too relieved. I can talk loudly again in my cubicle. I can lay in my bed without thinking of dot-sized bloodsuckers waiting to pounce. I can walk with my head held high.

At least for now.

The one in which Rachel says “No more to handing out my number to strangers"

Here’s the thing: I can be naive.

Attending college in Salem, Oregon – what I like to call the civic armpit of the Northwest – probably didn’t do much for teaching me the social mores of fast-paced city dating. Where a conversation (either in real time, real life, or real whatever) leads to a whirlwind of flirtatious texts (and boy do I appreciate a good texter), drawn out email conversations at 2:00 AM and inevitable Facebook stalking. And then, like all the gusty sighs that preceded it, it loses wind, or momentum, or something, and it ends just like that.

All this to say, Salem-style relationships were different. Slower. More inbred. People there are not quick to ask you for your number. (And for the record: getting asked by the at large homeless community, product of budget cuts at state-run mental hospitals, does not count).

So maybe my naiveté was not wholly my fault. In my defense, I had no one to explain the significance, or lack thereof, of a “can I get your number?”

I remember the first guy who asked me for my number in New York. I’d been here two weeks, was still looking for work, and when attending a work party of a friend, inevitably gravitated toward another recent college grad. After talking to “Joe” (fake name not used to protect “Joe,” but simply because I can’t actually remember his name) for a good hour or two, we parted ways. Him – with my number in his iPhone. Me – with my feelings lifted after regaling him with all my job interview sob stories.

Big surprise, “Joe” never called. Not so big surprise, I still hadn’t caught on to the complete lack of follow up inherent in a good-natured “can I get your number?”

So I kept on handing it out to any guy I met. The way I handed it out – despite my pretensions of privacy (epitomized by my “private” settings on Facebook) – you’d think I was into guerrilla marketing or self-promotion or selling some type of service. That, or just plain dumb.

The cycle continued. And like a law of nature, it always followed the same mold: chat with cute guy, cute guy asks for number, I act all easy-breezy and give it out – all the while feeling a rosy glow of “this is what New York is about…meeting random, cute people in a Serendipity-inspired fashion.” Cute guy never calls.

So finally this week, I’m saying “enough.” No more. After handing it out for the umpteenth time (and please note that this is not a vanity blog post…I just have zero capacity for saying no to even the very weirdest, most odd characters who you should NEVER give your number to), I’m calling it quits.

Ask me for my number, and all you’ll get from now on is my email address.

So here’s to a year of email spam.

Cigarettes, Sauerkraut, and Death

This coming Halloween will mark one year of me living where I live now. There's three of us, three rooms. The guy on the lease and I obviously haven't changed. But the third roommate has changed about five times since I moved in. One of those darling roommates was written about in Pooky. Besides her we had a lady live here for about two weeks and then left saying it was too wet here, a yuppyish fella who I thought was okay but then he and the other guy living here started fighting or something, a guy on parole who didn't do all his community service so he had to go back to jail, and now we're on our fifth who pees with the door open and uses my baking sheets to dry his shorts in the oven. So the guy on the lease, for privacy issues, we'll just call "Rawburt." He's the one that always give these people the third room. He's asked me about it before but I'm never there when the people stop by so he just says "They seem to be fine." He basically gives the room to the first person who responds to the craigslist ad. 

And speaking of Rawburt, he doesn't do anything. Not really. The very first thing I think of or picture in my mind when I think of Rawburt is him in the living room on his recliner watching his flat screen television. All the time. That's it. And he orders pizzas. I've seen him eat bowls of sauerkraut. He gets work sometimes from…wherever, but the third roommate and I pay more than him, even though he definitely has the largest room. So we basically pay him. I didn't find this out until six or seven months after I moved in. He's kind of clean, but I feel like he's getting less so. 

So what's the deal? I mean, why am I still here? Why haven't I moved out? Well, for one, I kind of have a lot of stuff, and no car, so it's hard to move. Secondly, it's pretty cheap where I live, the cheapest around probably. And the place isn't cramped or anything, so it's relatively a good deal. And I have bothered Rawburt about the unfair rent payments but…I don't know…he comes up with dumb reasons, and like I said, it's the cheapest around. And I'm only here until may or june. As long as I stay in my room...

But who knows. I have a pretty good job now (yeah. suckway fired me) so I'm making a bit more. I could just very well pay slightly more for a better place. But in the end I'm so ridiculous, it'd be so hard to find some random people that would be great to live with. I don't have any friends that are needing roommates right now.

Oh well. 

TO-DO LIST

Well, it's been quite some time since I've posted. Not out of lack of misery, but out of lack of energy to relive it. I figure I'll ease into the blogger's life with a list. You see, I am a nanny. Which is, in itself, great. Sort of like having fake kids you get to leave every day between four and five pm and see again in the morning at seven am. But sometimes, this nanny thing I'm in turns into an exercise in humiliation. And cheap labor. Before certain confrotational talks took place, I had somehow evolved into nanny-housekeeper-errand-runner-cook.

Here is a list of tasks I received during the first month of nannyship:

-- clean the fish tanks (yes, tankS)

-- buy three containers of Greek Yogurt (typically on the list once a week)

-- vacuum and steam the floors

-- clean, peel, dice potatoes; chop onions; put in pot on stove

-- find "reasonable but classy cookies - maybe the Italian ones at the Market, or...?"

-- teach the five-year-old how to tell time (I taught her jazz hands, we're still working on time)

-- teach the two-year-old how to put his toys away (I taught him to say "Cowabunga!")

-- scrub showers (this words must be typed and read: pubic hairs)

-- windex windows of fingerprints

-- reorganize Madi's hair supply drawer (I did this)

-- tidy up Madi's pajama bins (I didn't do this)

-- do the laundry (they wear things once, then throw them in the laundry bin)

-- mail this box of severed body parts ("for his spook box!) to Grandpa in California

But I manned up and grew a pair and drew the line. Now I have time to take the kids to the beach and snuggle on the couch and speak to them in accents. There are still moments of misery. Like Aiden peeing on my sweater. Like Madi screaming that she will blow up my head and run over me and ohimakehersoangry and shehatesme! Like getting Madi to do math homework. But the misery comes along with dimples and introducing a new generation to LCD Soundsystem and The Beatles and Arcade Fire and The B-52s.

(I can never remember the font we're using on this crazy thing called blog. Someone make sure this follows protocol for me, will you?)