Volunteer Explorer

My first real crush was my second-grade teacher, Miss Tate. She had frosted and feathered Farrah Faucet hair, and she wore bell-bottoms and metallic blue eye shadow. A little later in fourth grade, I fell for my best friend, Kelly Randolph. She was tall and had long brown hair and porcelain skin. For Halloween that year, I dressed as Tom Sawyer and she as Becky Thatcher. We got to hold hands as we walked around the school in the costume parade. It was probably also in fourth grade that a substitute teacher mistook me for a boy. I was a tomboy, always wearing the hand-me-down t-shirts and jeans from my three older brothers. In this 9- and 10-year-old period, I also sported a gender-bending bowl-cut my mom gave me in our basement. When we lined up in the classroom to go to the restroom, the sub took my arm, pulled me from the girls’ line, and put me in the boys’ line. It took the protests of all my classmates to convince her that I was, in fact, a girl. Flash forward to midd...

“I’m going to step outside for a cigarette before it gets crazy,” Stacy said as she put her coat on. “Okay,” I said, leaning on the counter of the concession stand. “Enjoy your cancer!” Only after I said it did I realize how that might sound to someone I had met less than an hour earlier. Stacy and I were the volunteers for Saturday’s show, tasked with selling drinks and snacks during the intermission of the night’s show, “Christmas in Akron.” Stacy’s response to my glib comment surprised me. “I do have cancer,” she said without changing her expression. “But I have brain cancer, not lung cancer, so it’s okay.” My stomach dropped a little at the thought of having offended her. Then she chuckled. “I’m so sorry,” I said. Then I put my hand to the corner of my mouth as if sharing a big secret. “You should be smoking something else, then.” Her eyes seemed to take me in anew. “Oh, I do that, too.” She didn’t seem in much of a hurry to get outside for her cigaret...

I’ve been in this apartment for almost a year now. I’ve had a lot of firsts here: the first utilities in my name, my first renter’s insurance policy, the first new mattress I’ve ever owned alone, my first time hanging artwork on the walls without input from anyone else. And that’s on top of my first birthday, Easter, Fourth of July, Halloween and Thanksgiving in this apartment. I thought maybe all my firsts were done, but then my mom brought a big cardboard box and a large plastic container tied with string to Thanksgiving dinner at my brother’s house. I had almost forgotten about those. It’s the first time I’ve decorated this apartment for Christmas. I’m not a huge advocate of Christmas. I don’t mind the holiday, but I do detest the over-commercialization of it, the emphasis on consumerism, the six solid weeks of aggressive advertisements and repetitive music. What I love about this time of year is the feeling of magic. For me, that feeling comes from pretty lights an...

I have such abundance in my life. One thing I am especially grateful for is the multitude of awesome women around me. This weekend, I reconnected with three excellent friends from grad school, and our non-stop conversation and laughter was like a balm. We talked about a lot of things on our road trip and during short Uber rides in Pittsburgh and at bars and walking down sidewalks and on the sofa and at the table. My favorite part was when our conversation turned to the idea of the four of us starting a business together. This was not pie-in-the-sky daydream talk, but realistic comparisons between our ideas and other start-ups, and meaningful explorations of how we could do it. It was exhilarating. I felt the way I used to in grad school: like I was surrounded by some of the smartest people ever discussing the most important topics ever. So much of my time and energy this past year has been focused on men. Whether it’s my soon-to-be-ex-husband, one of the guys I’m dating, or on...

It seems like the universe is pushing me in a particular direction. I say this with full acknowledgement that I have admonished others for personifying this cold, lifeless universe. I appreciate the irony. Still, though, the whole ‘one door closes and a window opens’ metaphor is rather apt right now. Another apt analogy is ‘leap and the net will appear.’ I hate both of these clichés so much that it pains me to acknowledge that they might actually have substance. Not so long ago, yet in that period of languid summery heat that feels like a lifetime ago, an acquaintance made the distinction between ‘having a job’ and ‘generating income.’ I was dazzled by this acquaintance for reasons outside of his business philosophy, but our short-lived liaison has left little more than this residue on me. I, too, want to generate income without the constraints of ‘having a job.’ Thus my decision to leap into the vast and uncertain world of freelance work. To that end, I gave notice in...

When I conduct interviews, one of my favorite questions to ask is, “If you were a superhero, what would your super power be?” Most people want to fly or be invisible or time travel. I would choose the ability to speak any language fluently upon hearing just a bit of it. If that plug-in gadget from The Matrix was a real thing, I would upload so many languages that I’m sure I’d crash my system or have to start forgetting childhood memories or something.   Last week I attended a meet-up at my local coffee shop for Francophiles. It’s called “Café Français.” We were about seven people covering a wide age range, all attempting to carry on small talk about ourselves, the weather, politics in our somewhat rusty French. It’s been probably three years since I seriously tried to have a conversation in French. I still think in French sometimes; I count reps when I work out in les chiffres fran çais . This weekend while I was running at the park, I found myself working through some voc...

To commemorate the night when the veil between the world of seeing and the world of being is at its thinnest, I give you a Halloween Haiku: The cold comes creeping on dead-leaf treads of deep things entombed in lost dreams. Happy spookifying.

As week eight of the semester comes to a close, bringing us past the halfway point, I find myself counting down my time left at the university. Seven weeks, or fourteen days of showing up plus 91 hours of online tutoring, encompass the entirety of my remaining commitment to this institution. Quantified like that, I am not at all certain I will be able to do it. And even though I have some anxiety about launching myself into the uncertain realm of freelancing, every day that I tutor makes me more certain that I do not want to tutor anymore. The futility of it is overwhelming me. Here is one example: A student came to me last week for help on her Basic Writing essay. Basic Writing is a developmental class, meaning it is designed to help students who did not score high enough to be technically eligible for college level courses gain the writing (or math) skills they need to take English Composition 1 (or a first-year level math course). The majority of students in Basic W...

At the risk of sounding out of touch with the current trend, I want to say that I have not been sexually assaulted. Per se. That is not to say that I have not experienced misogyny, disrespect or pain due to my gender. It’s just that I don’t really know how to qualify my experience. And maybe that’s a similar predicament for other women, as well. Let me share. Many years ago, I was at a bar/restaurant in downtown Akron with some friends. It’s a place that still physically exists but is in its third or so manifestation since the time of my incident. It was a regular hangout for me and my friends; we gathered there in a group of 10 or 12 most Friday or Saturday nights to share pitchers of beer and talk increasingly loudly until one or more of us staggered out, leaving a tab that someone else had to pay in our stead. It was our rust-belt version of Cheers. This particular night, I was at a table with my husband and our best friend. There might have been a fourth person, probably a...

1. First, there was a sudden, sharp stomach cramp around noon on Tuesday. This quickly faded into 2. A sudden, sharp bowel cramp. This one lingered and throbbed until it became so distracting that I had to leave my job. 3. In the car, I got the “hot spits” that often come on just before puking. I managed to talk myself into keeping it down while I drove. 4. Fever took hold pretty quickly after I got to my mother’s condo. I had been cat-sitting for her and wanted to make sure everything was in order, as she was due back the next day. The pain of fever is so intimate and overwhelming as to be akin to a lover. That deep-bone ache and those spasmodic, convulsive chills put one out of one’s mind the way mind-blowing sex can—but in a completely opposite way. 5. The bowel cramps very quickly localized to a sharp, angry, insistent, poking pain in my lower right abdomen. Through that long afternoon and night, I sipped water constantly and sat on the toilet periodically, thinkin...

This week’s staged reading at Coach House was called “Butter in a Lordly Dish.” Aside from the incredibly obscure biblical reference in the title, the story was quite entertaining. It ran only about thirty minutes, and more than half of that was set up for a wonderfully murderous payoff. We first meet two Cockney house servants gossiping about murderers in the news. The focus of their conversation is whether a man convicted not long ago of killing several young women was really the reprobate murderer he was made out to be by his lawyer. Next we meet the lady of the house they serve in, who is visited by a female friend. Their conversation reveals that the lady’s husband has, at the very least, a roving eye, if not a multitude of affairs. Her friend clearly disapproves of both the implied infidelity and the lady’s long-suffering attitude toward it, especially in light of her two children. The husband enters, and his pomposity is surpassed only by the lady friend’s verbal barbs at h...

I volunteered at Coach House Theater Friday evening. A few months ago, I interviewed JT Buck, the artistic director who is steering the theater through its ninetieth year after almost shutting down due to lack of both funding and effective leadership. He’s an awesome guy, but he has undertaken a mammoth task. Consequently, volunteers who show up and have half a brain are greatly appreciated. It’s an odd coincidence, but I recently rewatched a movie from the turn of the 21 st century whose main character reminds me strongly of JT—that is, if the character were gay, but that’s a minor point. The film is “The Tao of Steve,” the character is Dex, and the actor is Donal Logue. If you’ve seen it, you know that the character and plot echo the story of Don Giovanni: a man woos women by way of a Taoist-esque philosophy that includes, among others, a tenet of becoming desireless. Dex is remarkably successful in this endeavor, despite the extra weight he gained after graduating college. The...

I am not the kind of person who necessarily links music to specific moments in my life. I don’t have a “soundtrack for seventh grade” or anything like that. I like music, of course, but it was never the most important thing to me, even when I was a teenager. And the older I get, the more I find that I prefer silence, especially when I’m working or reading. The one exception for me is in the car. No matter how short the drive, I turn on the radio. I love finding a good, fast, funky song, cranking the volume and singing along as loud as I dare in close traffic. I took a random bunch of CDs when I left the house, mostly because my internet would not be hooked up until a week after I moved into my apartment. Old-fashioned media on a late-90s-era boom-box entertained me for that long January week. I saw the nine-disc set of “Traveling Music” my husband had compiled for road trips years ago among the loose CDs in a travel case, but I pointedly avoided listening to them. I am not sure wh...

One of my favorite places within the framework of Highland Square is Mount Peace Cemetery. It’s a ten-minute walk from my apartment, and I can lose upwards of an hour wandering its roughly one square mile. In January and March, I walked through the cemetery thinking about endings, death, loss. It was a place where I could be sad without seeming out of place. I watched the trees bud and the grass grow lush under a slowly warming sun. At the beginning of September, with all the trees and shrubs in their fecundity grasping at the dregs of summer, I walk here thinking about life, about all the lives these stone markers represent. Who were Gladys and Gerald Sullivan? Where are their children? Who was Chester A. Hoff, dead in 1939 at age 50? Why is there no spouse next to him? I mine these graves for stories now, for character names and ideas. The death I saw in winter seems fully alive in the flush of summer, teeming with possibility. Here is Edward and Elizabeth Me...

I got the theater itch in high school. My gateway drug was fifth-grade choir. The choreography we added to the spring show in middle school took it up a notch, leading me to the a capella jazz ensemble in high school. This quickly escalated to the junior and senior class plays. I knew I was a hopeless addict when I found myself at an audition for a community theater production of “The Haunting of Hill House.” I got the lead and plunged into several post-high-school years of incessant thespian activity. Over the course of one very hectic year, I appeared in no less than five productions at as many different playhouses. This habit began to fade when I got married. My husband was not the kind of person who seeks any kind of spotlight, and community theater makes daunting demands on the free time of its participants. I was happy to get clean of this often sordid occupation. The drama was almost always more intriguing off-stage than on. Besides, as I got older, I developed a crippling...