Entries

See, this is why the librarians love me.

The other morning, long before the sun was even thinking about rising, we were all woken up by the fire alarm, which is broadcast over the PA system. We stumbled out into the hall, putting on shoes and coats, and started down 92 flights of stairs. I was confident that it was yet another false alarm, and when I smelled something unpleasant in the stairwell I crabbed in my head about creeps who won’t go outside to smoke, and Kitey would never do that, and look, there’s a cigarette lying right there on the stairs, my god, you’d think people would show a little more consideration. That’s when the unpleasant smell started smelling a lot more like plastic and a lot less like cigarettes.

The whiney voice shut up and I continued following Todd and Paul down the stairs, wishing that we’d brought the cats with us. Though we couldn’t see it in the air, by the time we’d descended ten flights the smell was terrible. Two men in their early twenties were standing in their boxers and tank tops, hugging themselves and rubbing their arms. Their apartment door was wide open.

I couldn’t hear what they said because the fire alarm was echoing up and down the stairwell, but Todd reports that the gist of it was, “Oh, man, we are seriously embarrassed. [Incomprehensible] just went up in smoke! You already walked down ten flights? No, no, it’s okay. Go back upstairs. Please. Please?”

Not willing to bank on the word of two people who weren’t even alive when I was in third grade, no matter how pretty they were in their tank tops, we continued walking down. We were very surprised by the number of people in the lobby - usually we’re the only ones uncool enough to be overcautious. Paul mooned over the firetrucks and, knowing that it was going to be fine, Todd and I amused ourselves by snickering over what people had thought to bring down with them: one woman clutched her hamster in a blue cage close to her chest to keep it warm, a man held a Logitech keyboard box in a way that suggested he thought it was a silly as the rest of us that he’d grabbed it before running downstairs. A man and woman drove by, their dog in the back, calling, “Is it safe to go back in?” out their window. The same woman who brought a full breakfast onto the elevator last week stood there with blankets and pillows. I turned to her and said, “I’m looking at what everyone else brought down, I mean, blankets and pillows? Very smart, and what do I have?” I held up my hand. “Two library books.”

She laughed kindly. “But what if you had to wait a long time? It was a good idea.”

We all got onto the elevator together and I told her about the two young men. She said, “I’d have pretended it wasn’t my apartment. I’d have been like, ” ‘Oh, I wonder WHO could have caused all this SMOKE? I’ll just follow you guys down the stairs, okay?’”

I saw The Mosquito Coast in the theatre when I was fourteen. I found it brilliantly written, acted, and produced. I also decided to never watch it again. As someone who finds disappointment unbearable, watching those people go through such a heart-wrenching disappointment left me in tears.

When we were living in Pennsylvania and Todd read the book by Paul Theroux, we decided to watch the movie again. I had exactly the same reaction.

Saturday morning, Todd asked me to watch the movie again. He eventually won me over, but I was definitely -

You know, my 7th grade teacher, Mrs. Skjerven, had a giant poster on the wall of the classroom that had “ALOT” crossed out, and “A LOT” written right next to it. I have not made the mistake of spelling it as one word since. But the word “definitely”? It’s not only that I’ve been misspelling it my entire life, it’s that I keep thinking I’ve figured it out. It’s definatly! It’s defininately! I’ve got it THIS time!

- but I was definitely a reluctant viewer. What I didn’t expect was the degree to which we can now relate to the Ally Fox character, who takes his homeschooled kids to Central America to build a utopia. We bemoaned his absence at the yurt, where he would surely have figured out an environmentally friendly way to haul water from the spring to our faucets, and a way to recycle the trash that converted it into energy that would make the laptop work out there in the woods.

Then, his character said:

We eat when we’re not hungry, drink when we’re not thirsty. We buy what we don’t need and throw away everything that’s useful. Why sell a man what he wants? Sell him what he doesn’t need. Pretend he’s got eight legs and two stomachs and money to burn. It’s wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. There are people in New York that live on pet food, and would kill you for a quarter. You don’t dare take a walk, for fear somebody will stick a knife in your ribs! Think about it! You stay home, and they come in through the windows! Ten-year-old homicidal maniacs on every street corner!

And I paused the movie and said, “Wasn’t I JUST saying that, in part eleven of my Why America is Scary lecture series? Oh my god. I’m Ally Fox.”