Rural Missouri - Welcome to Danzig

So, I've only been here a few days, and it seems much longer. You may naturally think that means I'm not too thrilled to be in rural Midwestern America. You would be wrong, but you'd also be right.

I shouldn't be writing this, but I know with my alzheimer-like memory, I'll forget these observations quickly (I still read stuff from Bangkok that I've totally forgotten). I should be looking for a decent job, as I'm trying to avoid ending up as a waitress at the Chuck Wagon restaurant, despite the fact that "they make really good tips!"

GOOD STUFF
Let's start off on an optimistic note, shall we? The good stuff may not be funny, but hey, it's still...good.

The Guy
- So Beau, as I’ve renamed him, is here, obviously, and he’s pretty fantastic, otherwise, why the FUCK would I be here?

The House
- Tiny, square, and peach-colored. Two bedrooms, an expansive backyard with a nice porch step we sit out on, a deck for kicking back in and BBQing, and all those birds (see below). I love it. It’s been a very long time since I’ve lived in a house, and it’s nice, real nice.

The Weather
- It's like 70-78 degrees every day (so far) with a gentle, locks-lifting breeze. I'm in heaven. 59-79 is like my perfect temperature range.

The Beauty
- Okay, so it’s no New Zealand or Scandinavia for breathtaking, “I wanna live here!” views, but already green with Spring, covered with wildflowers that you feel sinful stepping on, and surrounded by lakes (including the biggest one in state which seems to attract copious amounts of “men with boats” as my mother so hatefully called them, Danzig is fairly easy on the eye. This morning while driving Beau to work, I saw a sunset that knocked me out – the Sun a flaming ball of startling beauty.

The Birds
- I'm no ornithologist; I've always found birdwatchers to be a bit...wacky. There was a professor I knew back in grad school who had a story about how he went bird watching in southern Arizona (a rather desolate and sweltering area), where he sat on a small boulder, facing some sort of raptor, who likewise faced him, and the two, sitting on their respective rocks, stared at each other for the likes of an hour or two. After that, the professor, quietly thrilled (professors are not keen on any kind of robust emotion except when their academic egos are attacked), stood up, and left, thoroughly content with his day. Though I find that story amusing, I also find the thought of that kind of bird watching about as exciting as cleaning out the refrigerator.

And yet, during my dreamy five minutes of hanging clothes on the line a couple days ago (see below), I saw five different species of birds. Robins bounding jauntily along the grass like little kangaroos, Starlings screeching in the air, two large Doves cooing and nuzzling on a branch, a gracefully gliding Mississippi Kite, an Eastern Bluebird whizzing by, and a real live Woodpecker rat-a-tat-tatting away on the branch above my head (it's pretty loud stuff! But cool as hell). After years of pigeons and sparrows, the urban rats of the air, it’s nice to see, and hear(!) other birds. Oh yeah, and of course, there’s a slew of squirrels here too, “rats with better outfits” as Carrie said on Sex & the City, but I’ve always been kind of fond of them (except for that time when one got out of its live-trap cage in the car with me and I suddenly could only see in my mind’s eye it’s giant claws and it getting caught in my thick hair).

Oh yeah, and I almost forgot, there are Buzzards. I am NOT shitting you! The things circle in the sky overhead and are both impressive to look at, and stomach turning when you remember that they are not majestic hawks or eagles, but carrion trolling for prey.

The Dog
- Molly, the mangy curr that has belonged to Beau for a couple of years after she sprinted into his life, a stray unclaimed by the community, and I think I know why. Both completely the definition of a scruffy mutt and so frickin’ cute it nearly knocks you over, I don’t think I have ever witnessed so spastic and fanatical an animal before. Her love for Beau is so intense it starts to make me evaluate my own love for him, and so codependent it then makes me cease the evaluation. When he comes home, she is literally bouncing off furniture and will actually leap into his arms, a wiggling mass of ecstasy at another day where he DID NOT LEAVE HER! I love having a dog; I love dogs. The only reason I haven’t had one all these years is that living alone and frequent travel has made having one inconvenient to impossible. I always knew once I got to New Zealand I would definitely get one, but that’s several months away. For now we have Molly, who although won’t be following us to The Land of the Long White Cloud, I will be finding a great deal of enjoyment with her in the meantime. Already, she accompanies me on nearly every car ride, and follows me stalker-like all over the house, nestling up close and aggressively scraping a clawed paw down my leg whenever I ignore her for too long. I like her though – she’s fun, and loyal to the point of cultism.

The Zen of the Washline
- When I was a kid, growing up in suburban Arizona, my grandmother (who raised me along with my grandfather) had a substantial closeline in the backyard where all our clothes were hung. She said with the Arizona heat, she didn't need a dryer, which is true, but also, we were just dirt poor. I don't remember helping her to hang clothes that often, so I don't remember how I felt then, but as a child, I avoided any form of household chore as much as possible. By the time the government bought our home (to knock down to make a freeway which was eventually carved out instead much further east into the Pima Native Americans' reservation lands), we lived in apartments with their own laundry rooms, including dryers.

After only being here a day, Beau and I purchased a new washing machine. To make a long story short, a woman who had bought a new one, moved into a new apartment that already had a new washer/dryer set installed. Serendipitous for us! So, I happily handed over 50 bucks and got my first, my own, washing machine. Thrilling, really. In NYC I had to walk 2 blocks, UPhill (yes, it sounds like your grandparents’ uphill-in-the-snow story, but it's all true), to a laundromat out on Broadway that was long, but about as wide as a hallway and was always crowded, particularly with harried mothers and their screaming, under-your-feet kids.

So now, after having done about 10,000 loads of laundry already (when you move, you feel like everything's dirty by the time you get there), I've been outside hanging clothes on the line in a completely blissful state. I don't know what it is...the weather (which IS blissful), the slow, methodical peace of hanging clothes, the mangy curr, Molly, that scampers around sniffling and snuffling wildflowers and chasing squirrels in our sizeable backyard (holy shit, a backyard!). But I find the act of hanging clothes to be undeniably calming and ...blissful. Now, going back out there and taking them down, and folding them, THAT'S another story...

BAD STUFF

No TV, no really, NO TELEVISION!
- I have said it before - I am a total TV junkie. I make no excuses about it, and I feel no shame. And I love cable. LOVE it! Especially digital cable with its minimal bells and whistles. Beau has an old school big screen TV *cheer* but ...but...but it doesn't work! *SOB* I mean, it works, but it doesn't. It's one of those things that if you don't have cable, you don't have much in terms of reception. And to add insult to injury, I went to evil Walmart and purchased some rabbit ears, only to realize that there wasn't even a damn antenna on the roof of the house, so I basically was spending a lot of time, effort, and some money for NAUGHT. Now my little tiny TV is perched shamefully atop the mammoth big screen TV, they both don’t work, and I feel all white trashy.

To make matters worse, the cable company only comes to Danzig on Wednesdays (Oh LORD!), and the next available spot isn’t until April 26^th. Wait a minute, no cable, and NO TELEVISION for another three weeks? What am I, a pilgrim? An 18^th century explorer? An old school Marxist? Shit, even the makeshift, super-temporary and unstable construction crews that made about 2 bucks a day back in Bangkok had their TV’s set up. I saw the sick glow from their sets as I’d ride by on my motorcycle. I’d love to call up the cable company and threaten to go to the other cable company…but there isn’t one.

The Weather
- Beau keeps reminding me, over and over, that the approaching summer months will be HELL, and yes, each time he mentions it, HELL is in ALL CAPS in his voice. I don’t do well with hot weather. But that’s really in the future, so I shouldn’t bitch now, right?

30 Miles from Everything
- Okay, this tiny town has a Walmart, and despite my guilty feelings for using my consumer dollars at this evil giant, I have gone there, a few times already in order to get a few things that literally are NOT available anywhere nearby. Danzig is small, and yet strangely spread out in a slew of industrial business that involve large trucks (I think I may be one of the only people NOT driving a pickup), and though the town can also claim a Sonic (a fast food place I was not previously familiar with) and a Subway, several gas stations, a few roadside hotels, and a couple BBQ joints (Hello Chuck Wagon!), that's about it. 30 miles in either direction will bring you to mid-sized towns which offer, horrors, ANOTHER Walmart, a modest movie theater, a slew of fast food restaurants (Arby's, JOY!), a JC Penny's, and a K-Mart that was so empty it creeped me out. There was a Mexican Restaurant called Los Portales that I had really come to love in my past visits, but it seems to have come under new management who have closed it up for “improvements.” *sigh* You know that these improvements are rarely just that.

If you want to drive instead for a total of 90 miles, you can reach Springfield which is larger and somewhat cosmpolitan. St Louis and Kansas City, giant by Missouri town standards, are both about two hours away. With gas prices being the way it is and Beau and I already freaked out about our cash flow, I don't think that will be happening too often, though we already have plans for going to a big Scottish festival this coming weekend which I'm uber-excited about.

The Dog…and the Cats
- So, I have two cats, I always have. Currently I have Sabina who is coming up on 12 years old and Seamus, who has just passed four. I’ve had them since they were two and four months respectively and love them deeply. I believe in taking your animals with you wherever you go, even if it is abroad (to live, NOT for vacations!), and of course, I’ve brought mine with me this time, and plan on lugging them painfully to New Zealand (the process to get them there is six months long and costs a shocking amount of dough).

Of course, introducing two cats into a small house that has already been occupied by an insane dog is..a challenge. It’s not fun to have fucking Wild Kingdom going on in your living room at any hour of the day. In one particular incident, one of my cats, whom I was trying to SAVE, lashed out and hooked one front claw into my shoulder blade, and the other, get this, IN MY NOSE! Can you imagine the excruciating sensation of a single, curved and sharpened cat’s claw snagged quickly and deeply just inside your right nostril? I thought I was going to lose my mind at that moment, and nearly killed the cat I was trying to save. Seamus was on my shit list for almost 24 hours after that, as I saw my bloody shirt and surveyed a body now covered in holes and scratches (a rather impressive one across my inner thigh).

Jobs
- Okay, so I knew before I came that Danzig was not a sprawling Metropolis filled with administrative jobs or a vibrant NGO sector. I had already resigned myself to working some half-assed job to pay the bills (particularly that FUCKING huge Department of Education loan). But now that I'm here and taking a look around, a feeling of dread comes over me when I envision working at "RJ Roofing" all day long. In the end, I'll do what I have to do, and I am actually curious about the experience of waitressing at Chuck Wagon restaurant (it's on my "Jobs I'd like to try out for 6 months" list), but I'd also like something that doesn't just make me feel ...low. I'm not saying there's shame in these jobs, there's not, and I'll be the first to admit that half of them are fucking hard. When at the temp agency today, the woman said the only immediate jobs she had was for "assembly work" and I cringed. Assembly work was the only job I ever had in my entire life that I just flat out quit after a couple days. Every single other job I've ever had I've kept, usually for a minimum of a year and usually have only left when I was leaving the geographic area. But assembly work is hard, it's repetitive, and I found myself at the end of the day, covered in grease, hands cut up, and with a feeling of general exhaustion and loneliness. After two days, I apologized profusely to the temp agency, told them to give me anything else, and spent the next several weeks until grad school started working happily for Hardee’s restaurant manning the drive-thru window until they offered to promote me to manager (I chose grad school instead).

Tomorrow I will drive the 90 miles to Springfield in hopes of procuring a job they advertised on the web for an hourly rate that would have made me pause in NYC but is considered wildly generous here. I think I may be a bit late for that one since it was supposed to start today, but it’s worth a try. I feel torn – if I get this good-paying job, I’ll be commuting an hour and a half each way each day – and I am NOT a fan of commuting, in fact, I found my lengthy subway ride to and from work in Manhattan to be at times agonizing and only the constant splurging on pop culture magazines and an engrossing trade paperback would save me from throwing my ADD ass onto the tracks. Stuck in a car with no reading material and only a tape deck deeply concerns me. I could play the radio, but then I’d be subject to the one rock station’s choice of music (my god, they play a lot of Kelly Clarkson and Rob Thomas), as well as a parade of Christian rock and Country music stations. Well, if I get the job, I’ll splurge on some sort of adapter to play my cd’s off my walkman. It’ll be worth my sanity.