I'm not in Kansas, anymore...

Yesterday was probably the scariest day of my life. Around 4:45, just as I was thinking about heading home from work, I heard a commotion out in the hallway. I had my door closed and I don't have windows in my office, so imagine my surprise when I poked my head out the door and saw the chaos outside. Looking through the window of one of the lawyer's offices, I saw that the light was dark olive green, so dark it was almost like dusk, and there was debris flying by the window at an alarming rate. I knew the weather forecast had called for some bad storms, so when someone said there was a tornado warning, I was incredulous. Regardless, the building alarm began to sound, so we all headed down to the lobby of our 26-story office building (our office is only on the 4th floor). I took an extra minute to turn off my computer and lights and pack up my bag, thinking I would just leave once the coast was clear. As soon as I got down to the lobby
I realized that, once again, I had left my cell phone in my desk drawer and would have to go back. For once in my life, my chronic forgetfulness served me well. It may even have saved my life.

In the lobby, people were milling everywhere, packed in like sardines, as the entire building tried to fit in the tiny lobby area between the banks of elevators, trying to stay away from the outside windows. We couldn't see much of the outside and there was little or no news about what was going on outside, except rumors and snippets of information texted to people's cell phones. We laughed and made jokes, thinking this was just a passing storm. I even made a less-than-tasteful joke about how tornadoes seem to target the poorest people in the towns they hit, especially trailer parks, so this twister would obviously hit the dirt parking lot down by the river where I and the two other AmeriCorps members park our cars for free. It was funny at the time and I thought, "Now that I've said it out loud, there's no possible way it could have happened." Much to my dismay, I was dead wrong.

We waited in the lobby for what felt like ages, waiting for the elevators to get back up and running. The doors to each floor in the stairwell lock from the inside, so we couldn't even take the stairs back up to the office. Finally, someone called the receptionist in our office, who happened to still be there, so we all tramped up the stairs and she let us in. I immediately grabbed my cell phone and left, thinking it had been a long day and I just wanted to go home.





When I stepped outside for the first time, I felt as though I had been punched in the gut. My blood ran cold as I stood in the middle of the one-way street behind the Sheraton, surveying the disaster scene that lay all around me. It was like a horror movie. Tree branches and whole trees lay on the ground everywhere, a piece of insulation from God-knows-where lay torn on the ground, sirens screamed all around me in every direction as emergency teams rushed to help the injured. As I stood there, stunned, my phone rang. It was my dad, all the way up in Lebanon, New Hampshire, calling to see if I was okay. I was amazed at how quickly he had gotten the news. I told him I was fine and described the scene around me. He asked about my car and I told him I was on my way to the parking lot to check on it and I would call him when I got there. The walk back to my car never felt so long. I had to dodge stop-and-go traffic on East Columbus Ave, as cops directed traffic through the dysfunctional street lights and drivers stared unblinkingly at the wreckage around them, paying very little attention to the traffic. One girl was so intent on taking pictures from the driver's seat with her cell phone, she almost hit me. I don't think she ever knew I was there.

Walking through the parking garage, I was shocked to see tree branches blown all the way inside and caught under people's cars. I thought, "If it's this bad inside the covered garage, I should be awfully nervous about my car. When I stepped around the ticket-booth arms at the entrance of the garage and out onto West Columbus Ave, I had to stop and catch my breath; all along the train tracks, where there had been a thick wall of trees and shrubs that morning, was now a clear view all the way across the river to the transfer station in West Springfield. To my left, huge trees lay across the roadway, blocking most of the traffic and I could see they had taken out some stoplight poles and power lines. To my right, I could see Memorial Bridge, where the tornado first touched down and knocked over a tractor-trailer. As I crossed the street, carefully dodging slow-moving cars, I saw there was a power line down across the entrance of the parking lot and the ticket-collector's booth was completely blown off its foundation.
I gingerly stepped across the power line and into the dirt lot. People were standing around everywhere with looks of shock and dismay on their faces. The closer I got to where I'd parked my car, the more nervous I got. All around me were cars covered in dirt and mud and tree branches, many with one or more of their windows blown out, the shattered glass covering the ruined interiors. When I finally came to my car, this is what I found:


I was utterly astounded to find my car completely intact. No broken windows, and only a few scratches, dents, and a broken antenna. I felt like the last woman standing in a game of Russian Roulette, with cars on either side of me completely destroyed. Even the sign for the parking lot missed my car when it ripped right out of the ground. I called my dad back and let him know the car was scratched but not badly damaged. As I was on the phone, my aunt called, too, but I let it go to voice mail, figuring I would call her back. My dad said the damage was probably worse than I could see through all the dirt, but I was so relieved and so thankful to be safe and unhurt that I didn't even care about the damage to my brand-new, 5-month old car, especially when I saw what was tangled in the branches of the tree limb that was stuck in my passenger-side front wheel-well. It was a cardboard sign, handwritten with black marker that read: "HOMELESS. PLEASE HELP. THANK-YOU." I immediately spun around and looked with horror at Memorial Bridge behind me. I know that there are often men with similar signs standing on the median strip at the end of the bridge; I pass by them every morning. I could only pray that this man made it to shelter in time.

As I cleaned the dirt and debris off my car and dragged the tree branches away, I saw one of my coworkers, Betsy, come into the parking lot. She had ridden to work that day with one of the other AmeriCorps members, Aleta, who rents part of her house. The poor girl's car was ruined, all three windows on the passenger side completely shattered. Betsy and I spent a lot of time taking pictures and just remarking on the incredible damage that surrounded us. I moved my car up next to hers and offered to give her a ride home.

As we waited for her to get in touch with Aleta, who was still at the office, I kept trying to call my aunt back, knowing she and much of my family were probably afraid for my safety. I couldn't get a call out to save my life; I just kept getting a busy signal and getting cut off, meaning the circuits were all overloaded with people trying to do the exact same thing. It was a miracle I had managed to get a hold of my dad. Even my text messages were bouncing back. I heard a voice call my name and I turned and saw Michael and Arlene from the Courthouse coming toward me. They had parked in the same lot that day by happenstance, even though they usually park downtown. Michael told me that windows had been blown out at the courthouses and people had run inside for shelter, bleeding and crying. The tornado had taken the whole top floor off a building on Main Street, about a block from my office building, and cars were flipped over on Bliss Street. Michael, who always tries to lighten a somber mood, wrote "WASH ME" on the side of my filthy car.

Suddenly, someone told us there might be another tornado coming, so I grabbed my keys and my purse and we ran back to the office building. The elevators were working again, so we went up to the fourth floor and watched from our office to see if anything else was going to happen. Thankfully, it didn't. Looking out of Marion's window, I saw camera equipment on the rooftop below and realized the CBS 3 news team on the floor below us must have dropped everything and run for cover. They had even left the microphone and a hairbrush lying on the ground.
I used my office phone to call a few friends and family members that I knew were worried about me and then, the danger having mostly passed, I took Betsy home. Aleta followed us in her car, which she insisted on bringing home to get out of the rain, even though she had to brush glass off the seat to get in. We passed through a thundercloud as black as night on our way through Springfield, but we all made it home to Chicopee safe and sound. The town was practically untouched by the storm and the skies were mostly clear by the time I finally pulled into the parking lot of my apartment building.

Later, I looked up news stories on the tornado and found out that four people were killed in the disaster, and countless more were injured. This video was taken from the weather station on top of my office building, this video was taken from a car on I-91, less than a mile from my building and looking right at it, and this one shows the roof being ripped of an historic building on Main Street, a couple of blocks away. Apologies for the profanity in the latter two videos. I probably would have sounded about the same if I were in their shoes.

I had friends and family calling me all night asking if I was okay. It was so nice to have people concerned about my safety, but after the fourth or fifth call, I just didn't want to tell the story any more. This is my full account, then, of the tornado that hit Springfield, MA on June 1, 2011, the official opening day of Atlantic Hurricane Season. I'm thanking God and all my lucky stars that the worst that happened to me was having to deal with my auto insurance company. It makes you thankful for everything you have, from your friends and family right down to the limbs precariously attached to your body. This was a day I will never forget.

Catcher in the Ryan

Last night, as I lay in the semi-dark, staring at the ceiling, trying to fall asleep (it seems I still can't get used to the fact that it never really gets dark in the suburbs/city), I was wondering what kind of book my life would make. I mean, if my life were a novel, 1) Would anyone read it? and 2) Would it be a work of "literary merit," as my high school English teachers used to say? It's one thing to be a popular book, a "page-turner" if you will (or if you won't)--the kind of book that you buy in mass market paperback at the duty-free counter in the airport when you have a four hour layover in Milwaukee and "actually find quite interesting." It's another thing entirely to be a book that is critically acclaimed, a classic, or at the very least controversial.

Somehow I doubt my book would be challenging in any sort of profound way (maybe the bits about my mom would work out to be some sort of heart-warming "Secret Life of Bees" or "Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood" thing, but that's no "Jane Eyre" or "Great Gatsby"). I think the problem is that I'm just too sane. I'm a stable, well-adjusted young woman, and stable, well-adjusted people make for inconsequential, mediocre literature at best. I posed the thought to my ex-boyfriend tonight over zombie-slasher video games, saying,

"I feel like you have to be Holden Caulfield to be someone of literary merit. It's like you have to be seriously f***ed in the head to make good literature, right?" Tom looked pretty puzzled, wearing his trademark incredulous half-grin as he slashed a group of living dead through the head with a chainsaw and said,

"I think you have to be pretty f***ed in the head to have a thought like that."

It was a surprising response and I almost pissed myself laughing, but maybe he's right? Maybe my strange thoughts alone are "f***ed-up" enough to grant me passage into the realm of classic literature. Maybe it's not so much the less-than-controversial things I have done in my life that make me interesting, and more the ridiculous nonsense that goes on in my head that counts (very Holden Caulfield, actually, but far less masochistic and suicidal). Then again, maybe I'm just talking to myself again and I'm just another dime novel, after all.

Martha Beck's "20 Questions That Could Change Your Life"

(Oprah.com) -- If you're like most people, you became obsessed with questions around the age of two or three, and scientists now know that continuing to ask them can help keep your mind nimble however old you eventually become.

So when someone suggested I put together a list of the 20 most important questions we should all be asking ourselves, I was thrilled. Initially.

Then I became confused about which questions to ask, because of course, as I soon realized, context is everything. In terms of saving your life, the key question is, "Did I remember to fasten my seat belt?" In terms of saving money, "How much do I need to retire before I'm 90?" is a strong contender. If daily usefulness is the point, "What'll I wear?" and "What should I eat first?" might lead the list. And for the philosophically minded, "To be or not to be?" really is the question.

Because I'm far too psychologically fragile to make sense of this subjective morass, I made the bold decision to pass the buck. The 20 questions that follow are based on "crowdsourcing," meaning I asked a whole mess of actual, free-range women what they thought every woman should ask herself. Thanks to all of you who sent in entries via social media.

The questions included here are composites of those that were suggested most often, though I've mushed them together and rephrased some for brevity. Asking them today could redirect your life. Answering them every day will transform it.

1. What questions should I be asking myself?

At first I thought asking yourself what you should be asking yourself was redundant. It isn't. Without this question, you wouldn't ask any others, so it gets top billing. It creates an alert, thoughtful mind state, ideal for ferreting out the information you most need in every situation. Ask it frequently.

2. Is this what I want to be doing?

This very moment is, always, the only moment in which you can make changes. Knowing which changes are best for you comes, always, from assessing what you feel. Ask yourself many times every day if you like what you're doing. If the answer is no, start noticing what you'd prefer. Thus begins the revolution.

3. Why worry?

These two words, considered sincerely, can radically reconfigure the landscape of your mind. Worry rarely leads to positive action; it's just painful, useless fear about hypothetical events, which scuttles happiness rather than ensuring it. Some psychologists say that by focusing on gratitude, we can shut down the part of the brain that worries. It actually works!

4. Why do I like {cupcakes} more than I like {people}?

Feel free to switch out the words in brackets: You may like TV more than exercise, or bad boys more than nice guys, or burglary more than reading. Whatever the particulars, every woman has something she likes more than the somethings she's supposed to like. But forcing "virtues" -- trying to like people more than cupcakes -- drives us to vices that offer false freedom from oppression. Stop trying to like the things you don't like, and many vices will disappear on their own.

5. How do I want the world to be different because I lived in it?

Your existence is already a factor in world history -- now, what sort of factor do you want it to be? Maybe you know you're here to create worldwide prosperity, a beautiful family, or one really excellent bagel. If your impressions are more vague, keep asking this question. Eventually you'll glimpse clearer outlines of your destiny. Live by design, not by accident.

6. How do I want to be different because I lived in this world?

In small ways or large, your life will change the world -- and in small ways or large, the world will change you. What experiences do you want to have during your brief sojourn here? Make a list. Make a vision board. Make a promise. This won't control your future, but it will shape it.

7. Are {vegans} better people?

Again, it doesn't have to be vegans; the brackets are for you to fill in. Substitute the virtue squad that makes you feel worst about yourself, the one you'll never have the discipline to join, whether it's ultra-marathoners or mothers who never raise their voices. Whatever group you're asking about, the answer to this question is no.

8. What is my body telling me?

As I often say, my mind is a two-bit whore -- by which I mean that my self-justifying brain, like any self-justifying brain, will happily absorb beliefs based on biases, ego gratification, magical thinking, or just plain error. The body knows better. It's a wise, capable creature. It recoils from what's bad for us, and leans into what's good. Let it.

9. How much junk could a chic chick chuck if a chic chick could chuck junk?

I believe this question was originally posed by Lao Tzu, who also wrote, "To become learned, each day add something. To become enlightened, each day drop something." Face it: You'd be better off without some of your relationships, many of your possessions, and most of your thoughts. Chuck your chic-chick junk, chic chick. Enlightenment awaits.

10. What's so funny?

Adults tend to put this question to children in a homicidal-sounding snarl, which is probably why as you grew up, your laughter rate dropped from 400 times a day (for toddlers) to the grown-up daily average of 15. Regain your youth by laughing at every possible situation. Then, please, tell us what's funny -- about everyday life, about human nature, even about pain and fear. We'll pay you anything.

11. Where am I wrong?

This might well be the most powerful question on our list -- as Socrates believed, we gain our first measure of intelligence when we first admit our own ignorance. Your ego wants you to avoid noticing where you may have bad information or unworkable ideas. But you'll gain far more capability and respect by asking where you're wrong than by insisting you're right.

12. What potential memories am I bartering, and is the profit worth the price?

I once read a story about a world where people sold memories the way we can sell plasma. The protagonist was an addict who'd pawned many memories for drugs but had sworn never to sell his memory of falling in love. His addiction won. Afterward he was unaware of his loss, lacking the memory he'd sold. But for the reader, the trade-off was ghastly to contemplate. Every time you choose social acceptance over your heart's desires, or financial gain over ethics, or your comfort zone over the adventure you were born to experience, you're making a similar deal. Don't.

13. Am I the only one struggling not to {fart} during {yoga}?

I felt profoundly liberated when this issue was raised on Saturday Night Live's "Weekend Update." Not everyone does yoga, but SNL reminded me that everyone dreads committing some sort of gaffe. Substitute your greatest shame-fear: crying at work, belching in church, throwing up on the prime minister of Japan. Then know you aren't alone. Everyone worries about such faux pas, and many have committed them (well, maybe not the throwing up on PMs). Accepting this is a bold step toward mental health and a just society.

14. What do I love to practice?

Some psychologists believe that no one is born with any particular talent and that all skill is gained through practice. Studies have shown that masters are simply people who've practiced a skill intensely for 10,000 hours or more. That requires loving -- not liking, loving -- what you do. If you really want to excel, go where you're passionate enough to practice.

15. Where could I work less and achieve more?

To maximize time spent practicing your passions, minimize everything else. These days you can find machines or human helpers to assist with almost anything. Author Timothy Ferriss "batches" job tasks into his famous "four-hour workweek." My client Cindy has an e-mail ghostwriter. Another client, Angela, hired an assistant in the Philippines who flawlessly tracks her schedule and her investments. Get creative with available resources to find more time in your life and life in your time.

16. How can I keep myself absolutely safe?

Ask this question just to remind yourself of the answer: You can't. Life is inherently uncertain. The way to cope with that reality is not to control and avoid your way into a rigid little demi-life, but to develop courage. Doing what you long to do, despite fear, will accomplish this.

17. Where should I break the rules?

If everyone kept all the rules, we'd still be practicing cherished traditions like child marriage, slavery, and public hangings. The way humans become humane is by assessing from the heart, rather than the rule book, where the justice of a situation lies. Sometimes you have to break the rules around you to keep the rules within you.

18. So say I lived in that fabulous house in Tuscany, with untold wealth, a gorgeous, adoring mate, and a full staff of servants...then what?

We can get so obsessed with acquiring fabulous lives that we forget to live. When my clients ask themselves this question, they almost always discover that their "perfect life" pastimes are already available. Sharing joy with loved ones, spending time in nature, finding inner peace, writing your novel, plotting revenge -- you can do all these things right now. Begin!

19. Are my thoughts hurting or healing?

Your situation may endanger your life and limbs, but only your thoughts can endanger your happiness. Telling yourself a miserable mental story about your circumstances creates suffering. Telling yourself a more positive and grateful story, studies show, increases happiness. Wherever you are, whatever you're doing, choose thoughts that knit your heart together, rather than tear it apart.

20. Really truly: Is this what I want to be doing?

It's been several seconds since you asked this. Ask it again. Not to make yourself petulant or frustrated -- just to see if it's possible to choose anything, and I mean any little thing, that would make your present experience more delightful. Thus continues the revolution.

Ramblin'...where to begin? I taste the summer on your peppery skin...

This has got to be the first real snow day I've had in years. In college, school still happens regardless of the weather. You may or may not have class, depending on whether or not your professor has a car with all-wheel drive, but you still have that 15-page paper to write, that group project meeting at the library at 9:00 and that take-home test from the maniacal calculus teacher who thinks spending four hours a week in class, three hours in tutoring and God-only knows how long per week on homework just isn't enough. This is the closest I've come to a grade-school snow since grade school. I helped a friend dig out her car and her driveway, which was sort of like building a fort (not really), and work was canceled, so now I'm all cozy in my little apartment watching the snow continue to fly by the window and accumulate in the bittersweet vines across the way.

I finally talked to my dad about "the future" and he was wonderful, of course. I don't know why I still dread talking to my father about difficult things, like he's going to blow up on me like he did when I was a kid and be angry and disappointed in me. He's not that person any more; we've both grown a lot since those dark days and we've also grown closer. I honestly tell people that my dad is my best friend, because it's true. I thank my lucky stars every day to have a dad like him. He's kind and patient (except when he or I get lost) and funny and a blast to hang out with. He always gives me the best advice and he's so damn smart I can hardly stand it sometimes. Just the wisdom that comes from living a long, hard life, I suppose.

Anyway, I told him how much I hated my job and don't think I can survive another year and a half, let alone the six months I have left in my current contract. The work is boring and not challenging at all, the other AmeriCorps members (except Tiff and Mike, who ROCK) are catty and take themselves so seriously it's almost ridiculous. The trainings are crushingly boring and such a huge waste of time for the most part. I wake up every day and need the Jaws of Life to pry myself out of my bed and go to work, and on my days off, I spend half my time dreading having to go back. It's embarassing, frankly, because it's should be a great job--I'm helping people, I'm in an office full of nice coworkers, I'm learning a lot, and I'm getting paid. I should be happier, but I'm just not. Even if I can't explain it, it's honestly the way I feel, and it's important to be honest with yourself and listen to what your body is telling you. I told my dad all of this and he said he knew exactly how I felt. He remembers jobs that he hated more than anything in the world, and he also remembers working for companies that were closing down and playing solitaire as he counted down the hours (sounds familiar).

I told him I was still unsure about what to do next. He said, "Well obviously you need to look for a new job. Start looking now, because it very well might take that long to find one." He also said I should try to figure out what I'm passionate about, what I'm good at, and what makes me happy and pursue that. I honestly laughed out loud and said, "Funny you should say that, because I've been dreading telling you this, but...I know what really makes me happy is cooking..." and then braced myself for the hurricane.

Instead, he said, "Great! You can make a lot of money and be really happy in a cooking career." I was half taken aback and half completely unsurprised. Half of me knows my father is going to be supportive of whatever I decide to do, but half of me still remembers the old scars. I told him how scared I am of making such a huge shift and such a huge commitment, and told me "Why not start out small? Dip your toes in the water before you jump in? Take a few cooking classes and see if you like it; get a part-time job at a restaurant and see if you think you can cut it. If you fall in love with it, you'll turn 25 in less than two years and finally get your trust fund from when we lost mom. If you want to cash in some stocks and go to culinary school, it's your money and your life. I say go for it!" Seriously, he's so damn smart sometimes.

I love my dad so much it hurts sometimes. He's the best man that I've ever known and I'm so proud to call him father. I usually don't have the courage to tell him so (without a little "liquid encouragement" anyway), but I really should say it more often. He's the best dad in the world. Frankly, I think it makes it hard for me to find a boyfriend that measures up because my standards are so high. I'm not ashamed to admit I'm looking for someone just like my dad. It's a good thing, in my case, assuming that such a man exists (sometimes I'm not so sure). I guess that's enough mushy stuff about my dad. I think I'll go enjoy this snow day a little more: read a book, watch a Disney movie, play my guitar...did I mention my New Year's Resolution? It's to rediscover my passion for playing guitar. On New Year's Day my dad totally called me out on not practicing and losing my passion and I finally admitted to myself that it's because I miss my girls so much--Nina, Medina, Carlo, and Katy especially. I miss sitting around the living room at Park Street, passing the guitar around and singing along to songs we all know by heart. I've felt lost without them and so I've barely touched my guitar since graduation. I'm going to get it back though--the passion, the talent, the calouses and everything. I'm starting by leaving my guitar out of the case all the time. It sits on my sofa mostly, and so far I've been picking it up a lot more now that it's not "out of sight, out of mind" under my bed. It feels great, and I can't wait to show off my new songs to my dad and all our friends at the Luau in April. I'll show 'em I've still got what it takes!!!

For the record, my heart is sore.

Such a long time it has been since I posted last. I think I failed to finish my stories from the Sturgis trip, but I'll come back to that eventually. I had to set that aside for a while because when I got back from South Dakota the defecation really hit the ventilation with my boyfriend and he asked me to move out, so I did, and shortly thereafter he broke up with me. I have since been relearning how to be alone and how to be single. Some days I love it; other days I cry for the loneliness in my heart. I found a studio apartment in Chicopee, just a few miles from my old Alma Mater, Mount Holyoke, and moved in on October 1, 2010, just a few weeks after beginning my new not-job (it's technically a "service position") as an AmeriCorps Legal Assistant at a Legal Services office in Springfield.

For the past five months I've been helping impoverished immigrants file pettions for legal status in the U.S. and most of my clients have been women who are victims of domestic violence. It's an incredibly difficult job, emotionally, but not especially challenging mentally, so I've slowly grown to dislike it. Don't get me wrong, I'm incredibly grateful to have a job in this difficult economy and the people I work with are wonderful, but I've decided in my heart that I was not cut out to be a lawyer, as cool as it might be to put "Esquire" after my name.

I had a bit of an existential crisis this morning, as recent college graduates are wont to do. In my heart, I know I want to cook and to go to culinary school and learn to be a great chef, but I haven't yet accepted the drawbacks that come with that particular territory: low pay, grueling hours and no days off, no health insurance or benefits, very little room for career advancement especially in the current economy, etc. I know that becoming a lawyer or getting another desk job would have its own drawbacks, though: I wouldn't be as passionate about it, probably, it wouldn't be as much fun, I run the risk of becoming bitter and cynical in a job I might hate, and I'd be doing something for the money because I'm up to my eyeballs in student loan debt, not because I'm following my heart. Plus, sitting in a desk chair all day is wreaking havoc on my back.

I ended up having a decent day at work, which was encouraging, but I haven't made much progress on deciding what I want to do with my future. Do I apply for a second year with AmeriCorps because it's easy and safe and I can postpone/help pay off my student loans and put off making a real decision for another year? Or do I decide I can't take it any more and have to woman up and find a new job? Grad school is another option on the table, but I'm just not ready to go back to school yet, I don't think. Got a pep talk from my best friend from high school, Kyle, and feel a lot less panicked now, but eventually I have to decide, and eventually I have to tell my father about it. Horrors.

I had a dream a couple weeks ago that was a sequel to Mary Poppins all drawn in anime, including a flashback prequel to how she became a nanny and met Bert. I gotta lay off the sauce.

Ants in your pants? Nope, grasshoppers.

Okay, "grasshoppER" (singular, not plural). Still a funny story though. We set up our camp on Sunday, right next to the port-o-johns for easy access, parking our bikes and the truck/trailer between the tents and the "thunderboxes," as one of my professors once dubbed them. Also key to this story, if I forgot to mention it before, is that the campground is really just an old cow pasture, complete with dried meadow muffins and what probably amounts to millions of grasshoppers (which are, by the way, a turkey's favorite snack, so we got to see a few flocks in the mornings, munching away on the hillside behind us). Seriously, when you walked through the grass, they would leap out of your way in every direction, like walking through a kettle of popping corn.

So, on Monday morning, my dad and I were doing something with the bikes, and I was squatting next to mine to check something, and when I stood up, I felt something touching my inner thigh. When I reached down and felt the small lump inside my jeans, the little bastard bit me! For those of you who've ever been pinched by a crab, it felt exactly like that. So I start yelling and jumping around like I'm walking on hot coals, grabbing at my pants and trying to shake the little creep out, but he won't let go. So, in my panic, I unbuckle my belt and button-fly and yank my jeans down to my knees, taking just the back-end of my underwear in the process, and sustaining at least another bite. Still cursing my lungs out, I fish the grasshopper out of the folds of the jeans and flick him away into the grass where he could hop freely and go torment some other poor soul.

At this point, I recover enough of my awareness to realize that Meredith and my dad are standing there laughing their asses off and, if it weren't for the port-o-potties directly behind me, I'd be mooning the entire campground. As it was, only a few members of our group heard the commotion and managed to stick their heads out of the canopy/tent in time to see me bashfully trying to recover my pants and what was left of my dignity. Seriously, though, you should have seen the bite marks; they frickin' hurt!

Today was boring and not worth recounting. We're at an EconoLodge in Princeton, I'LL and plan to have "kickstands up" by 8:00 A.M. See you then!

"That's it, man. When I go home I'm gonna find me a new Black Guy."

So, all my dates are gonna be screwed up since I'm so far behind on my blogging, but the days have just been so packed I haven't had the time or energy. In fact, I've been going to sleep earlier and earlier every night except last night. Last night I got to stay up and do the laundry! This hotel had one washer and one dryer for what probably amounts to 300 guests, so it took a while to even get our turn.

We went out to dinner at this awesome restaurant called Carnaval. It's on it's way to being a pretty big national chain, I think, because the concept is so cool and so well-executed. It's basically a Brazillian steakhouse, but you can order seafood or pasta or other regular entrees. However, unless you're vegetarian, I recommend you don't bother with all that. Go for their "Gaucho-Style" dinner. For $25 you get unlimited trips to the hot and cold salad bars (the garlic mashed potatoes knocked my socks off--I had to go back twice for more), and a large, plastic coin that's green on one side, red on the other. Turn your coin over to green and prepare to be bombarded. Waiters with long skewers full of meat--top sirloin, pork chops, prime rib, Parmesan chicken, bacon-wrapped steak of some kind, all out of this world delicious--and warm, cinnamon-dusted pineapple circle the dining room, looking for green coins. If they spy yours, they plop their tray down next to you and proceed to shave off your choice of cut right off the skewer. Every guest gets a pair of tongs to help you take the cut to your plate as the waiter slices it. Plus, they'll bring you plates and plates of coconut-crusted fried bananas. Seriously, if you ever get the chance, you've got to try this place out. Oh, and the bathrooms were GORGEOUS. I felt bad about using them to their intended purpose. The faucets were made to look like old-fashioned water pumps! So cool.

Anyway, we're on the road home, now, and today's going to be an especially long day, so I have plenty of time to catch up on my blogging. We broke camp yesterday morning, partially in the rain, and said goodbye to Lenny and Benny, on their way back to Seattle with Lenny's wife, Lisa. Speaking of Lenny and Benny, I should probably explain the quote in the title of today's entry. Lenny and Benny are friends of Tony and Jap (For those of you who don't know, Jap is, in fact, Japanese, but his initials are actually J. A. P. so it's not a racial slur, I promise.) from Seattle. Lenny is a tall, thin, tow-headed white guy with a wry sense of humor and a really easy-going manner. Benny is shorter than Lenny, but he's a big, sassy black man with quick tongue and slow accent. They are the oddest pair I have ever seen and I love them dearly. One night at the campsite, they were bickering over the day's ride, since Barry had led the group that day, instead of Lenny, who was our fearless leader the first two or three days. Benny was giving Lenny shit about not "respecting his authoritaaay" as leader and Lenny finally just said, "You know what, man, that's it. When I go home I'm gonna find myself a new Black Guy." We all just about fell out of our chairs laughing.

I'm going to try to keep up appearances a little, here, and divide up the posts chronologically, even though the date stamps will be off. Wish me luck. And here's a picture for you: the closest we got to a buffalo all trip!

We Don't Serve Women, So Bring Your Own

That was actually posted on a sign outside a bar we passed the day before yesterday. Awesome.

First of all, I felt a lot better after I got a good night's sleep. I woke up and thumbed my nose at the previous day's self-pity party, chalked it up to PMS, and called it a brand new day. I'd also like to take back what I said about this trip not being what I hoped for. Two weeks is a long time to be on the road, and I'm just bound to have a bad day or two. C'est la vie!

So back to business. And by business I mean a proper blog, not all this whiney, angsty, teenagery livejournal bullshit. In fact I'll probably edit a lot of that out as soon as I'm near a proper computer.

We took our time yesterday morning, not really sleeping in, but at least relaxing more than usual. Dad and I dropped my bike off for repairs at a place in Sturgis, but he ended up being too swamped to be able to take it. At any rate I was without a bike and thus ended up on the back of Mattie's Road King. We headed out around 10, bound for Mount Rushmore and passed through some of the most beautiful country I've ever seen.

Unfortunately, we got stuck behind a bad accident; there are hundreds of thousands of riders here and accidents are bound to happen. This was really brutal though. We didn't see the accident itself but we saw the ambulances rush in and, a few minutes later, watched the paramedics pulled the white sheet and black body bag out of the truck. It was a somber procession as we rode through the scene, as soon as the police began directing traffic. The body was in the left lane, covered up except for a single foot sticking out from under the body bag, and the river of blood trickling down into the ditch. I had a really visceral reaction and had to fight not to throw up. It was definitely sobering. It made us all think pretty hard about why we ride. We do what we love and love what we do, but we have to realize the heavy risk we take every time we get on a bike. To me, it's worth it, especially when I look around and take in all the incredible things we saw the rest of that day.

For the sake of not making one stupidly long post, I'll post this much now and catch up with the rest later.

Things are looking up

I know it's been two days since my last abysmal post but, trust me, things are looking WAY up. I'll post more tomorrow. Here's a picture of Benny on Lenny's mini bike to tide you over.

Have you ever felt so out of place that the smile on your face was to keep from crying?

I don't even know where to begin explaining this day. It was generally miserable with a couple highlights. That about sums it up. This is not a great start to the trip.

To make a short story long, let me begin by saying that my motorcycle doesn't have a windshield. At least, it didn't until late this afternoon. For those of you unfamiliar with motorcycles, riding without a windshield may look really cool, but get up any faster than, say, 55 mph and it's like getting dragged into a dark alley by a bunch of angry Russians and getting the snot kicked out of you. Several parts of our trip today took place at 65-75 mph and all I can say is that I hope that is the closest I ever come to physical and psychological torture in my life. First of all, it's just a straight-up battle to sit upright when the wind is blowing into your chest like that. Second of all, the wind is practically deafening at that speed; I could literally feel my eardrums luffing like a sail inside my head. My ears are still ringing. Third of all, I had trouble seeing, especially after my sunglasses shattered against my skull due to the intensity of the wind. I'm not even kidding; the frame just suddenly snapped against my forehead. I thought I'd been hit by yet another bee or large beetle. Finally, there's a lot of dust in the air over the road, especially when passing vehicles and the bikes ahead of you kick it up and, believe me, that stuff STINGS at 70 mph.

To top it all off, I've been having engine trouble with my bike, and occasionally it would "stutter" or cut out completely, usually whenever I had just managed to forget about the last incident. It all just gradually added up and slowly drove me to distraction. I just about snapped. It was a really rough day. We finally wound up at the Harley dealership in Rapid City, where my dad finally bought me a really nice windshield from Memphis Shades, which was on the day's agenda even before I had my little meltdown. The difference was incredible. We got back on the interstate to head back to our campground and I was grinning like an idiot because, for the first time ever, 70 mph didn't HURT. I haven't had that much fun on a bike in ages. Plus my back felt better because I wasn't straining to hold myself up. The icing on the Awesome Cake, though, was stopping at the bottom of the ramp at our exit and seeing the license plate on the car in front of us from Nebraska. I've been "collecting" license plates from all 50 states for the last 3 years, exclusively on cross-country road trips, and I've been ticking off the last few from the Northwest on this trip. Nebraska was the very last one. (Okay, so technically I still need Hawai'i, but I never had high hopes for that one.)

At any rate, I'm exhausted and stressed and depressed and feeling incredibly out of place. I just don't feel like I fit in here, and it's really getting to me. When I get like this I tend to space out and do really stupid things, like accidentally leaving the truck running at the campsite the entire three hours we were down in Sturgis checking out the rally, which just makes me feel infinitely worse. I just keep screwing up, which makes me paranoid that no one likes having me around because, quite frankly, I don't want me around right now. I just want to stay in my tent and sleep and stop bothering everyone, but--oh, yeah--I can't do that either because the wind is so strong in this field it keeps crushing my tent on top of me and whipping it around so noisily I can't sleep. And I have a sunburn.

Anyway, here are some random pictures from the day: Lenny and Benny messing around with Lenny's mini-bike that he bought for his son years ago; the 6:30 A.M. sunrise from inside my tent; and a couple pictures from Spearfish Canyon and Spearfish Falls.

Yeah, the places here have awesome names like Spearfish, Dead Horse Gulch, and Hell Canyon. I'm jealous.

Sturgis or bust

We're so close to Sturgis I can almost taste it. Just in the last few hours, the number of motorcycles on the road has tripled, at least. Frankly, South Dakota just isn't as as pretty as Minnesota. It's just prairie land stretching into infinity, it seems. Flat as a frying pan and about interesting to stare at for six hours. Saw a couple cool things, though: some longhorn cattle and tons of Black Angus (or Black and Gus, as Tommy and I call them), fields of sunflowers stretching out to the horizon, an 80-foot brachiosaurus in a town called Wall, and more billboards than I've ever seen. Seriously, there's nothing else to look at out here so they just line the roads with billboards, every couple hundred feet for hundreds of miles. They're really annoying, actually. Also, we stopped at gas station with a bar called the Busted Nut. No Joke. And we drove through a swarm of butterflies that got stuck in my grille. Just arrived at the campground! Woohoo!

Minnesota makes me smile

Rolling through Minnesota farm country today. It's unbelievably beautiful. Just fields of corn and soybeans and something emerald-colored I can't identify stretching away from the road for miles. Every once in a while I see a crop duster circling above a field or a huge windfarm way in the distance, the wind turbines making their lazy, endless circles in the sky. A crop duster even blew right past us on the left, a few feet off the ground. So cool. We stopped at a gas station and I found the funniest snack. It's a starkist package deal, with a pouch of tuna, a packet each of mayonnaise and relish, a napkin and mixing spoon, a packet of ritz crackers and even a little mint for your tuna breath. I didn't end up eating the mint, though. It looked like a tiny urinal cake.

Feeling hungover today but it's well worth it for the awesome time we had last night. We arrived at Stevie and Annie's house around 2:30 and just about crashed. I even took a much-needed nap for a couple of hours. They have a beautiful home, about a half hour from St. Paul and Minneapolis, and it was wonderful talking to Annie. She and I just clicked and had some great conversations. I was a little bummed their daughter Katie wasn't there because she's just two weeks younger than me, but they just dropped her off in Boston for her new job. We had a great cookout with burgers and dogs and sweet corn on the cob. Annie even made brownies!

We're really pushing it today, trying to get all the way to Sturgis in time to set up our camp and tents and stuff. It's okay with me today, though. It's such a gorgeous day and this country is so beautiful; nothing can get me down today.

Getting out of dodge in Madison, WI

I meant to post again last night but finding a hotel was such a circus I was too exhausted. Once we crossed into Wisconsin we stopped for dinner in a rest area (or was that still in Illinois? I keep losing track!) And decided to press on for a couple more hours. At a gas station about 50 miles from Madison, we decided to just drive until we reach the outskirts of the city and can locate a hotel. Well, we couldn't find a hotel and ended up in the heart of Madison after dark and then the defication really hit the ventilation. We drove in circles for almost an hour, finding nothing but questionable motels. We even pulled into a place that looked like a total dive, purely out of frustration. I pulled up some reviews for the place on my phone and probably turned white as a sheet. I said to the crew, "We need to leave NOW." Seriously, some of the things people said about this hotel were just horrifying. I can't even mention them they were so vile.

At any rate, we ended up getting our bearings eventually and found a nice Howard Johnson's down the road around 10:00 or 10:30. What a relief! I was so exhausted, I was out like a light before 10:45. This morning I felt loads better but definitely could have slept a few more hours. I can feel myself getting crankier, just craving a little quiet me-time, but I seem to have found a small window, here. Everyone went into Hardee's to eat , but there's nothing on the menu there that I'll eat, so I came outside to type a quick little blog post. I can't wait to get to Stevie's house and get some relaxation time. Two hours to go!

Sorry, no pictures right now, but here's a fun fact for you: the state highways in Wisconsin are not numbered, but lettered. As far as I can tell, single letters (A, B, C, etc...) go north-south, double letters (AA, BC, DG, etc...) go east-west, and triple letters go God-only-knows-where. But don't quote me on that.

Sweet Home Chicago

We're less than an hour from Chicago, now, and hoping to get another four or five hours in before we stop for the night. We're making great time, though, especially since we gained an hour when we crossed the time zone line on the Indiana/Illinois border. We're hoping to get as far as we possibly can today since it's only another 10 or 11 hours to Stevie and Annie's house in Minnesota and we'd like to get there early tomorrow and have the whole afternoon and evening to relax and visit with them. Steve is one of my dad's oldest and closest friends from when they grew up in Milton, outside Boston, and they always have some great stories of their escapades. I'm really looking forward to seeing them; it's been so long!

It's sort of shocking to me, actually, how quickly Indiana passed beneath our tires and was gone. It's actually taken me so long to type this on my phone's little qwerty keypad that I'm now staring at the city scape of Chicago for the first time in my life. After what seemed like endless miles of nothing but corn and soybeans as far as the eye can see, I'm actually stuck in gridlocked traffic in the middle of one of the biggest cities in the country.

Here are a couple pictures of the city as I saw it, as well as a ridiculous display I saw in a rest stop gift shop in Indiana. They're called Roffle Buddies they're just stuffed animals with a mechanism inside that makes them literally ROFL (Roll On the Floor, Laughing), and they emit this maniacal cackle that makes me wonder what diabolical bastard thought a child would enjoy such a thing. Anyway, that's all for now. More soon!

Round One...FIGHT!!!

Well, day one is over and it's been a long one. I woke up to the sound of Tony grinding coffee in the kitchen and had no idea where I was for a moment. Strange blanket, strange couch, strange house: I slowly remember that I'm in Connecticut and that, last night, my dad and his girlfriend, Meredith, showed up at my house at dusk, hurriedly strapped my motorcycle into the trailer attached to the back of my pickup truck, and whisked me away to our rendezvous point at Tony's house in Connecticut, where Matty was already waiting.

This morning we woke up early, just as Jap rolled into the driveway, trying to get a head start on the day, but after we finally worked out the jigsaw puzzle of trying to load everyone's stuff and the coolers into the bed of the truck, a rainstorm swept in and forced us to wait it out for a little over an hour. We drove from about 9:15 a.m. to around 8:45--almost a full 12 hours of riding. The guys were all on their bikes, while Meredith and I rode in the truck, towing just my bike and looking like the biggest couple of lesbos you've ever seen. My MoHo's would be so proud! We traded back and forth with the driving about every other rest stop and did word puzzles together to pass the time. Thankfully we brought a metric s***-ton of CD's so we have plenty of great music for the long drive.

Other than the MONSTROUS tires we saw on the back of an oversize semi and the priceless moment when Meredith saw a couple other bikers pull up behind us and called them "stranglers" (she meant "stragglers"), it eas a pretty uneventful day. We ended up just short of our goal of Cleveland: at a Comfort Inn in Youngstown, OH. All in all, a great first day. Here are a couple pictures of the crew, for your enjoyment:

Testing picture blogging

Had to resend the post email twice. Still figuring all this mobile stuff out. Sorry about the "forwarded message." Didn't feel like retyping it. I'll get all this down eventually!

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: "Ryan Dorsey" <rhdorsey@gmail.com>
Date: Aug 2, 2010 12:28 PM
Subject: Testing picture blogging
To: <go@blogger.com>

This is my dad's sweet Mazda 3 that I get to zip around in while he's getting my truck hitched to the trailer. Just wanted to see if I could post pics on my blog from my phone.

Sprains, stains, and automobiles

So here's a rundown of information from the past few weeks.

1. Sprains

I am on week three of healing after spraining my ankle while shooting hoops with Tommy in the driveway. I am officially without crutch and without brace (experimentally), and seem to be doing very well. It was the second most painful experience of my life, but my knight in shining armor (Tom) carried my sorry, sobbing, wobbly ass into the house and got me an icepack and a vicodin and kissed it and made it all better. Well, a little better anyway. He made me laugh, at least. Neither of us remember if the ball went in after I took the shot which took my ankle, which is kind of disappointing, but I like to think it did.

2. Stains

I'm a red-head! Again! I tried dying my hair chemically a couple years ago and it just kept washing out, but I really loved it. So, this time I tried henna! It's all-natural and actually good for you and your hair, which is sweet. It's extracted from a plant and can be used to stain the skin or hair and when you buy it, it comes as an olive-green powder, which you then mix with something acidic--like lemon juice--and allow to sit overnight. The smell is pretty strong but not overly unpleasant. Really the only major turnoff is that the stuff is the color and consistency of goose poop. My friend Katy literally had to just slather it on my hair, and then I sat like that, with poo on my head, for four hours. It was worth it, though, because the color is GORGEOUS. It looks so natural now that it's had a couple days to mature. I LOVE IT!

3. Automobiles

The epic, whirlwind odyssey that has been my 2003 Toyota Tacoma pickup truck for the last year-and-a-half finally seems to have settle down. After flipping it on the roof in January (an $11,000 repair that my insurance company miraculously decided to take on), having the frame replaced by Toyota in July (factory recall for rust damage to the frame--$12,000), and the various systems and parts I've had to replace due to rust damage spreading from the crappy frame, I'd say my vehicle has racked up over $25,000 in repairs in the last year--about twice the value of the truck itself. Finally, though, all seems to be well and the truck is ship-shape and ready for her 4,000 journey to South Dakota and back over the next two weeks. Go Becky! (I named her after the Dierks Bentley song, "What Was I Thinkin'," wherein "Becky was a beauty from south Alabama; her daddy had a heart like a nine-pound hammer. What was I thinkin'?"


In other news, I got my droid yesterday! Huzzah! Still figuring out how it works (LG Ally), but hopefully I'll be good to go for picture uploads and whatnot by the time I begin my trip. WHICH IS TOTALLY HAPPENING THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW, GUYS. Holy crap. I should probably start thinking about packing...

It's a back-crack-a-lackin' good time!

I had my very first appointment with a chiropractor today (as in, first ever in my life). With a 4,000+ mile road trip ahead of me, I thought it might be a good idea to get myself straightened out beforehand (or un-straighted out, more precisely, as I was soon to learn). She was exactly how I pictured her: shortish and slim with thick, curly, crazy salt-and-pepper hair and a warm smile. Her name was Jodi and I think I'm in love with her.

Okay, probably an exaggeration (and probably inappropriate since she's ACTUALLY gay--as opposed to my pretend, girl-crush gay--and happily married), but I'm still pretty sure she's an angel. I've been having back pain for the past six months or so; not enough to be debilitating, but enough to frequently interfere with social activities like concerts and dinner events and enough to often disrupt my sleep. Because I'm brain-dead and college clearly did nothing for my reasoning skills, I failed to connect this back pain with the car accident I was involved in back in January, in which I hit a patch of black ice late at night on a back road in Vermont and flipped my pickup truck over a snowbank onto the roof. I escaped completely unscathed, except for a little whiplash in my neck that left me sore for all of three days and--apparently--a little brain damage that left me utterly stupid for connecting-the-dots. That is, until today, when Jodi asked me if I had received any great trauma to my body in the last year, such as a car accident, and--with a nearly audible "DING!"--the lightbulb finally went on in my head.

Jodi asked me some more questions and hit with a rubber hammer a few times (checking my reflexes, of course), and then took a couple x-rays, with she proceeded to show to me. Now, I'm not doctor or chiropractor, but even I know what a spine is supposed to look like and all I could think to say was, "Daaaaaang...". Intelligent, I know. It was fairly obvious that my spine was straight where it was supposed to be curvy and curvy where it was supposed to be straight. And that's bad. Having explained all this (and more) to me--in small words so I'd be sure to keep up--Jodi led me to the nice, cushioned table and prepped me with a little massage, which was MORE than welcome. Then came the really fun part.

More deftly than a woman of her stature ought to be capable of, Jodi twisted me up like a pretzel and literally JUMPED on top of me. It sounded like she took a fresh roll of bubble-wrap and wrung it out with her hands, and it felt just as satisfying. It was all I could do to keep from giggling with joy as she snapped and cracked my spine like a brand-new glow stick. I left the office with a list of five new appointments over the next two-and-a-half weeks and a lovely little spring in my step. Well, technically a spring in my LIMP, since I sprained my ankle last week playing basketball and still have to walk with a crutch. But that's beside the point.

The point is...the point...is...

...okay, I guess I don't really know what the point is. Story of my life.

All I really know is that I have found a new obsession: Chiropractors--they do it by manipulation.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Rallies

So I have this theory.

It's kind of growing into a life philosophy, actually. I've decided that things in life don't get better or worse, really; they just change. Really, I've only come to the conclusion that ancient Taoists came to centuries ago. The only constant is change, and this manifests itself in the laws of karma, which to me is more than a catch phrase reserved for moments of poetic justice, but an ideology that with every good event comes an equal and opposite "reaction" or counterbalance to this event (Newton was seriously on to something).

But I like to take it a step further. I think that there is a finite amount of matter and energy in the universe that is constantly changing and shifting in beautifully geometric and patterned ways. The elements move around, they expand and contract and implode in upon themselves, but the net effect is the same. At my most jaded moments, it seems like every time I get to a point where I'm really happy with my life, something comes along that blows it all away. So I guess it comes down to balance. There are times when life is wonderful and times when life kicks you in the gender-non-specific, but it's all a beautiful balance.

My high school theater director once gave me a metaphor that has stuck with me for years. She was giving me advice for directing a small play we were doing with the elementary and middle school kids, and one of my little actors was supposed to be playing Jesus Christ, standing at a window, "looking out upon the clockwork of the skies." The liner notes are complicated and too poetically written to actually be employed in any kind of set design, but it was important that the look on our Christ's face be appropriately pensive, patiently lonely and beautifully sad. To explain this to a thirteen-year-old, the director said something along the lines of the following:

"Imagine that you are the Son of God; not only that, you ARE God, the Creator of the Universe, and at some point in time, very long ago, you constructed everything that is and will every be, set it all up like the most complex run of dominoes ever conceived, and in one breathless motion, tapped the first domino, sending it toppling irreversibly into the next. And now, you're standing here, watching it all unfold."

I'm paraphrasing, of course, and taking some poetic license, but that's the gist of it. That what's done is done and will unfold as it will, no matter what. As Max Ehrmann wrote, "whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should."

So, with all this perpetually in the back of my mind, I begin my very first blog! I am a recent college graduate, currently unemployed, but starting a year-long term of service for AmeriCorps in a public service law office in Springfield, Massachusetts in September. I'm not sure I want to be a lawyer at all; in fact, I'm terrified of the future and have no idea at all what I want to do with my life, but that's an issue for another time. I'm living with the love of my life, Tom, in the in-law apartment of his parents' house in the suburbs. It's temporary, while we save up for our own place, but for a back-woods country girl like me, suburban life is definitely strange.

But, big adventures on the horizon! Before I finally enslave myself to the workforce for the rest of my life in September, I'm taking a two-week road trip out to South Dakota with my Dad and his friends for the Sturgis Bike Rally. We'll be taking both our motorcycles and my pickup truck with a trailer so we don't have to be riding the whole 2,000 miles. Mount Rushmore, the Grand Tetons, hairy biker dudes in leather: Oh, the excitement!!! I plan on taking loads of pictures and telling lots of stories, so brace yourselves; we're about to let the good times roll!!!