Maybe I’m just more inclined to notice than most people, but it seems like West Virginia’s running a pretty aggressive marketing campaign in D.C. right now.

I would swear that almost every metrobus I see (except for the ones sporting Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s face) is plastered with a lovely sunset or a blue rubber raft full of adventure lovers.

I love it, of course… Even if I think I’M actually the best marketing West Virginia has in D.C. It’s a lot more palatable than our last high-profile tourism/business campaign. (Let’s just say this one probably won’t come to a state-wide referendum.)

Anyway, the ads all say, “Where is your West Virginia?” and since I’m the kind of gal who talks to buses, I always reply: “In my heart, of course.”

Going back to West Virginia this weekend with an Iowan-turned-honorary-Mountaineer for the first time since I moved to D.C.– not to my hometown, but to Charleston for the art extravaganza, FestivAll.

That’s the thing about West Virginians. We always go home.

Just like we always show you were we grew up by making a mildly obscene geographical hand gesture. And naming all the famous people from our state (Don Knotts, Pearl S. Buck, Mary Lou Retton, Jerry West, Chuck Yeager, country singer Brad Paisley and that guy who plays Aiden on Sex in the City…)

If you talk to us long enough, we’re likely to also mention the longest single span arch bridge in the Western Hemisphere, John Brown’s Civil War raid on Harper’s Ferry, a certain dough-wrapped meat delicacy and whether or not we won the Golden Horseshoe

Since those roads (you know which ones) are taking me home, here’s a song for you good ol’ boys. And no, it’s not that West Virginia song (we reserve it for last call…)

“I thought I would always want to ramble,
I thought I would never settel down.
Well, I met her in the hills of West Virginia
In the heart of a coal mining town.”
-”Girl from West Virginia” by Doyle Lawson and Quicksilver

We were this before...

Midway through the late-night newsroom third-quarter crazies, grad school pal Diane and I took to calling each other (and everyone else) “scientists” as a faux-insult. As in:

“Stop being such a scientist, Diane.”

I’m not sure exactly what made it funny, but what made it funnier was the realization– well into the name-calling– that at the end of those long haul nights of fighting with Dreamweaver and cobbling together ledes … we would all be scientists. Or Masters of Science, anyway.

Though we had diplomas in hand in December, a good few of us trekked out to Evanston last weekend to walk in the ceremony… including my two former roommates in a wild house called “Dignity.”

We were that.

The most amazing part? Despite the almost perpetual panic over jobs when we lived together, we’re all OK. In fact, we’re better than OK. We’re on the second ROUND of OK.

Kat left Glamour for CNN. Katie left Red Eye for Washington Post and I’m… mid-leap from NewsHour myself, though I’ll miss it dearly.

Until yesterday, I was preparing to write a blog post about how June was the month of disappointment. And it sort of still was: the doomed interview, the perpetual headcold, the insincere boy, the general malaise of an overly-hot summer…

On this side of Monday, I feel differently. Could everything be right?

“I am a scientist – I seek to understand me
I am an incurable and nothing else behaves like me
Everything is right
Everything works out right.”

-”I am a Scientist” by Guided by Voices

If you’re wondering how my garden grows…

oh, baby I love your way

cucumber + grasshopper

Hostile Squash takeover

Struggler

The long view... (pre-transplanting)

“Stand beside it, we can’t hide the way it makes us glow
It’s no good unless it grows, feel this burning, love of mine…”

-”Take Care” by Beach House

Bike D.C. 2010

“The future’s all yours, you lousy bicycles.”
-Butch in “Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid”

I got a solid two hours of sleep on Saturday between the departure of the final house guests (4 a.m.) and the ringing of my alarm clock (6 a.m.).

Over the next hour, between pounds of the snooze button, I entertained dreams of skipping Bike D.C. and spending the morning comfortably a-snooze.

In the end, thrift and guilt won out. I’d already prepaid the $35 registration fee.

I laced up my sneeks, hightailed it to Pennsylvania Ave. just before the starting line closed at 8:30 and went to peddle 20 miles of D.C. and its counterparts across the Potomac. On very little sleep, with a slight beer-and-pizza hangover.

I’m usually one for quiet roads and empty trails,  but there’s an incredible, subversive feeling that comes with sharing a road meant for cars with thousands of bicycles.

I felt a little like last year, doing Bike the Drive in Chicago under similar sleep-deprived circumstances.

A swarm of hips, knees, ankles, peddles banishing more sinister modes of transportation. I took the first 10 miles fast, then savored the second ten. The rain stopped, the cobwebs in my head cleared. I slowed down and took some pictures.

Air Force Memorial

There was only one steep rise on the course and just as I was starting to get winded, I caught up with a guy who was riding with a ridiculous speaker system, at the first strains of You Spin Me Right Round (Like a Record) by Dead or Alive, and he carried me through.

I also made my first visit to the Air Force Memorial, near the end of the route. I drive past it to and from work and when it catches the corner of my on the way home at night, I always think it’s fireworks.

It’s been a little over a year since I got back into biking– an impulsive, desperate decision sandwiched in a particularly miserable couple of months.

Freckles!

Buyin that Schwinn from Craigslist was the mental equivalent of ‘walking it off,’ like my parents used to tell me to do when I crashed my pink girl’s bike as a kid.

I’m sure I can’t give the bike all the credit. A lot of things have changed for me in the last year and a half.

But biking has definitely been a peaceful, calming, occasionally exhilarating hobby to hang my helmet on.

It’s given me a reason to get outside and breathe fresh air, an excuse to spend time alone when I need it or a way to meet new people when I want to.

It has given me strong muscles, sharp focus and a way to get around that doesn’t conflict with my values. And lately, it’s given more than my fair share of freckles…

But then, who says it has to be sunny to go for a ride? Clearly not me. Or Butch.

“Those raindrops are fallin’ on my head, they keep fallin’
But there’s one thing I know
The blues they send to meet me won’t defeat me
It won’t be long till happiness steps up to greet me”

-”Raindrops Keep Fallin’ On My Head” by B.J. Thomas, as featured in Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid

“Ah! I cannot understand people who buy new beds, beds to which no memories or cares are attached. Mine, ours, which is so shabby, and so spacious, must have held many existences in it, from birth to the grave.

Think of that, my friend; think of it all; review all those lives, a great part of which was spent between these four posts, surrounded by these hangings embroidered by human figures, which have seen so many things…

And think of death, my friend, of all those who have breathed out their last sigh to God in this bed. For it is also the tomb of hopes ended, the door which closes everything, after having been the entrance to the world.

What cries, what anguish, what sufferings, what groans; how many arms stretched out toward the past; what appeals to a happiness that has vanished forever; what convulsions, what death-rattles, what gaping lips and distorted eyes, have there not been in this bed from which I am writing to you, during the three centuries that it has sheltered human beings!

The bed, you must remember, is the symbol of life; I have discovered this within the last three days. There is nothing good except the bed, and are not some of our best moments spent in sleep?”
-“The Bed” by Guy de Maupassant

I’ve never been much of a sleeper.  Consequently, I don’t put too much value on where or how I sleep. It could be a sleeping bag out in the woods, a plush, pillow-top queen bed or a scratchy airplane seat in coach… I’m still going to dawdle around, toss and turn and be the last to doze off.

My bed growing up was a hand-me-down from my dad’s childhood that has become progressively more squeaky and back-stiffening over the years. Every so often, the old wooden slats work themselves out of position and, whump, goes the mattress on the floor. Sentimental, sure. Comfortable, not a chance.

Then, came an array of college beds– metal dorm bunks and shady furnished apartment mattresses. My senior year’s was probably the worst– just a box spring on sort of a pallet, in the filthy Beechurst Ave. apartment over the Thai restaurant, where the refrigerator was in my bedroom.

When I graduated and moved to Charleston, I knew it wasn’t going to be a permanent arrangement. So, I bought a futon-in-a-box instead of a bed. Easier to move later, I rationalized. My housemate took my cue and bought the exact same futon. He still had it when I went back to visit over Christmas.

The futon was never the same after it was taken apart and reassembled in Chicago. By the time I moved to D.C. to finished my grad program, it had started sagging so deeply at the joint in the middle that I’d taken to sleeping on the love seat.

I left the futon behind in the Windy City and moved on to an air mattress in the District, which has served all my squishy sleeping needs… until last weekend.

I got a bed.

Having an uncomfortable, transient sleeping place has its perks. It has kept me from wallowing around in bed all morning on weekends. And it perpetuates the feeling that I could just pick up and cram most of my stuff into my car and move if I wanted.

So, now my life here has the weight of permanence– an anchor shaped like an Ikea headboard. I’m still in conflict sometimes about how much I like living in D.C. It’s the city grit of Chicago but without the joy. It’s the political venality of Charleston without the down-home West Virginia goodness.

But four months in, I’ve started piecing together a rag-tag sort of life. It’s enough of a sure thing to invest in a bed and tuck it way down some narrow basement stairs.

Maybe Guy de Maupassant’s letter-writer can’t see the value in a new bed. But I assure you, a slowly deflating air mattress is no place to start keeping cares and memories when you’ve decided you’re going to stick around for a while.

“This is the place where she lay her head
when she went to bed at night”

-”The Bed” by Lou Reed

So, about my new roommate… No, not The Tree Surgeon. (Can you believe he’s been here for almost two months?)

I mean my other new roommate. The one that has–I kid you not– moved into my baseboard, just like in the cartoons.

The Housemouse.

In some respects he’s a better than my actual roommates. Quiet, scarce, doesn’t leave dirty dishes strewn about or forget to lock the front door. But then, he also doesn’t pay 1/5 of the rent and I can be reasonably certain my other housemates don’t have mites.

Plus, he keeps intentionally showing me up. Here I am, a fancy-pants young professional with a masters degree from a snobbish private school thinking I’m all clever with my evolutionary advantage and a opposable thumbs. And I still can’t outsmart this mouse.

He showed up in my bedroom last week when it got really humid, presumably because the basement is much cooler than his usually home in the kitchen.

This is basically what ensued:

First, I brought down one of the kitchen traps and baited it with a Reese’s cup. Then I watched a Peta video about how mice giggle when they’re happy, returned the trap to the kitchen and Googled adorable pictures of mice for two hours. I looked up to see him peeping at me from behind the bookcase.

So, I threw a slipper in his general direction and began a multi-day building spree of several humane mousetraps involving trash cans, books, paper towel rolls and 2-liter soda bottles. All of which failed, despite liberal employment of peanut butter.

Now, we’re sort of at an impasse.

Chronologically, housemouse outranks me in the house-hierarchy. In fact, he’s the reason I got my room at all– the last girl who moved into the basement lasted for two weeks before she ran screaming to Craigslist because of the tiny, gray night-visitor hanging out behind the fridge.

My other roommates rant about him and dutifully bait traps with tasty treats, which he nibbles or ignores.

I’ve tried to remain neutral about the whole thing, keeping my cereal in a Tupperware container while silently rooting for him to escape a squishing.

Believe me, I’ve heard all the explanations of why this mouse should die. And I don’t disagree necessarily, but I just can’t put my heart into it. What if he’s back there making me a dress to wear to the ball?

Granted, I’ve got a predisposition for adoring things that repel other people: bees, reptiles, barnyard animals, the texture of burlap, creepy dresses last worn by grandmas, beards, TV shows about the removal of giant tumors…

But mice have a special place in my heart. My favorite childhood stuffed animal? Minnie Mouse. Favorite song I ever played at a piano recital? The theme from “An American Tail: Fivel Goes West.” Just last weekend I had a whole conversation with someone about the Beverley Cleary novel, “The Mouse and the Motorcyle” about cute little Ralph in his ping-pong ball crash helmet.

I don’t like that he seems to be bedding down behind the basement wall. But at least a mouse isn’t a rat. And one mouse isn’t many mice. I told myself, as long as he stays away from my face while I’m sleeping, I don’t exactly mind our uneasy detente. I won’t go out of my way to murder him and if he succumbs to one of the traps my roommates have baited, we’ll just call it fair. At least it’s not like I’m dumb enough to name him…

That was last week. Before the rerun of the This American Life–Live episode, featuring the adorable cartoon about a mouse, domestic violence, flood and true love– set to the tune of Andrew Bird’s “Eugene.”

So yeah. The mouse’s name is Quimby. And I think I’m the one that got trapped.

It’s true, I’m a sucker for peanut butter…

“Studies have shown that we like sheep are prone
To sure fatal doses of malcontent through osmosis
But don’t be sympathetic, just pass the anaesthetic
‘Cuz sheep are benign and on the young we will dine”

-”Eugene” by Andrew Bird

Quimby The Mouse from This American Life on Vimeo.

I licked lots of stamps and envelopes back in the dark, dark days before self-adhesive and blogging.

As a kid, I sent the boring, contemplative dispatches to a collection of pen-pals in exotic places like Russia, Japan and rural Illinois instead of to WordPress.

I usually kept up long after the friends on the other end of the mailbox had gotten bored with me. I admit I was the kid who actually delivered on those promises to keep writing after summer camp was over…

But it was my selfish desires that kept me licking all those bitter envelope seals. I was– and still am — totally tickled by getting mail.

Whether it was the relative isolation of my rural upbringing or an affection for Mr. McFeely, the postman on Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood… I’m pretty sure my first crush was on our mailman.

Or Mr. Mailman, as I called him, slumping around on summer afternoons, popsicle in hand, waiting for him to appear around the curve of the Old Oakvale Road.

I’m still eager to check the ol’ mailbox every afternoon, but usually there’s not much for me. But last week…

(more…)