Monthly Archives: January 2008

Thus begins The Year of The Experimental Living Apart Project, round one of which is a week underway. (Please ignore the fact that we are already 8 percent finished with the year. I have been spending my days moving more than 2,000 pounds* worth of possessions from one hemisphere to another so can we just pretend that the past two months of blogging negligence never happened?) My beloved house-husband is somewhere in the rough vicinity of the African continent for three weeks remaining and in the meantime I have been tasked with both finding a job and setting up home in our fair southern city.

I woke at 6 a.m. on the morning of January 13 to volunteer at the Houston Marathon. My running club hands out beer (!) and water at Mile #24 and in addition to this carb-o-licious beverage it is the volunteers’ job to yell encouragements to struggling athletes. It’s great fun to see someone perk up at the mention of their name and begin to pick up speed again. The warm-fuzziness of such community service coupled with the inspiration gleaned from watching 70,000 people run 26.2 miles on a sunny-cold winter morning put me right in the mood to re-examine Mein Überlist Oh Seven and write up a new and improved version.

I have ultra-high expectations for this year. Goal one was to get Gilda the Red 1978 Vespa running after three years gathering dust in our garage. CLH was not allowed to board that airplane nor sleep in the bed next to me until this mission was complete. My beloved scooter is and always has been a class A champ — we simply filled the gas tank, cleaned the carb, tightened the cables, and she started right up on the fourth kick. (By “we” in that last sentence I of course mean “he”.) I immediately rode her to Biba’s One’s-A-Meal for a gyro plate and Greek chicken soup in celebration.

CLH and I hope to buy a bona fide grown-up motorcycle as soon as he gets back so that we can embark on Texas Tour 2008 before spring is over. I rave about living in this, the largest state in the lower 48, but how is it that I have never been to Marfa? Or Big Bend or Brownsville or even the Germanic settlements outside Austin City Limits? I’ve spent the past three years traveling throughout Asia when I have the whole unexplored world right at the tip of my nose. It’s criminal.

Goal two was to do something productive with myself, so I spent several hours enduring the bureaucracy of undergraduate education in order to enroll myself in a single 5-credit-hour Spanish 1 class. After waiting in line all morning I found out I couldn’t enroll in a class without my undergrad transcript, despite the fact that I was enrolling in an entry-level class with no prerequisites. It’s penance, I guess, for failing to learn anything in Hangul beyond “beer, please” and “flying face kick” but I am determined to become bilingual again and I anticipate I’ll have way more opportunity to exercise my Spanish skillz in Houston than I had to speak French in Oklahoma.

It’s odd being back in school again a full six years after I celebrated passing my final final. I’m the only Anglophonic gringa rubia in a classroom full of cholitas and still-maturing babes who were already forced once by the Texas Educational System to learn Spanish in order to graduate high school. Still, on my way to the bike racks after class one day I totally got hit on by a totally cute co-ed who was totally eight years younger than me, and it made my heart soar with joy that I clean my face with extra virgin olive oil every night and thus still look young enough to be an actual college student. ¡Ay Dios moi! My first test is Tuesday!

I am also taking a sweet short story workshop at Inprint Houston, a non-profit sponsored in part by the U of H Creative Writing department, an MFA program so prestigious they only take 20 students a year (10 prose, 10 poetry). It’s taught by Randi Faust, who just had a short story chosen for the 2007 Iowa Book Review Award and who has a pretty wicked sense of humor. She didn’t blink an eye when I made a BJ joke on the first day of class. In February they’re sponsoring a reading with Dave Eggers and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, which brings me to my final point: oh the glory of my newly-acquired student identification card. Conveniently sized for proffering discount tickets at the new-fangled picture show, the county historical society museum, and free student entry for an upcoming reading of some high-falutin’ writerly types straight from New York City (get a rope!). Otha suckas gots to pay five dolla for the pleasure of it.

*Not an exaggeration.