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This is why I need my Tequila and Ukrainian Phrasebook.

Getting home for Christmas was pretty stressful this year. Having taken the wrong subway into Queens on the way to the airport, my friend and I found ourselves not in Astoria, but Little Russia. There was no bus stop. There were no cabs. Only traffic noise and some geese flying overhead, those bastards. Conundrum. I was carrying my weight in luggage. My friend was carrying a box of live turtles. Neither of us can read cyrillic. An elderly man who looked like he was plucked out of the Shtetl of Sholom Aleichem’s nightmares directed us to a “Car Service” on a dingy, diagonal block that smelled vaguely of borscht and windex. The office of this “Car Service” was the closest I have ever come to experiencing the Soviet Union.

Time and nature were having their way with the linoleum floor, which peeled away to show previous linoleum generations. Two moth-eaten chairs stood on one side, threatening to collapse under their next occupants. A dying, flourescent light danced across the somber, drop-tile cieling and the curling, water-stained maps of the USSR tacked to the walls. There was a candy dish. I did not dare to touch it. Through a tiny, crusty window, I could see the face of a candidate for “World’s Most Dissatisfied Individual”. He cocked one eyebrow, probably wondering why this naively perky white girl and asian boy carrying a box full of turtles wanted a car. I wish I could say he unscrewed a flask and took a hearty sip before asking us what we wanted, but that didn’t happen. We had a hard time understanding him. I heard “Eighteen dollars” as “Eighty dollars”. Having been the one to put us on the wrong train, I had offered to pay for the cab. My bank statement flashed before my eyes. If there were some cab-equivalent of “dine and dash”, I did not dare try it, for fear of waking up next to tiny, decapitated turtles. We were really stuck. Well, twenty minutes later, we were not really stuck. Our cabbie’s driving abilities were far better than his English, and we didn’t miss our flights.

 I need to find out how those turtles did on the plane. Apparently my friend’s floormate was guilt tripped into buying them from an elderly Chinese woman, only to find out later that these were the species of turtle that outlives multiple generations of owners. Not suitable pets for NYU housing. Of course, I don’t really understand keeping turtles as pets in the first place. I don’t look at a turtle and think, “Aww, I wanna touch it!”. I think, “That thing is carrying salmonella.” They don’t offer much companionship, either. You can’t exactly cuddle with something that just awkwardly scrapes around in its little terrarium all day.

Now that I’m home, one of my biggest concerns this holiday season, other than wondering how I’m going to finish Christmas shopping using only leftover gift cards, is that my freshman fifteen is merrily creeping along. I look like an extra from Fiddler on the Roof, cossack-dancing my way into my unnecessarily tight hipster-jeans. It’s going to be difficult, because as soon as I walk into my mother’s house, the kitchen is full of expensive, frivolous, holiday-themed, novelty food items, emblazoned with the logos of the bizarre medical firms that sent them. I’m mostly safe from the ones that haven’t been opened, though. Toffee doesn’t look as appetizing when it says, “Seasons Greetings from North Atlanta Urinalysis,” nor does peppermint bark from “Piedmont Autologous Blood Services”.

Of course, anything we don’t eat will eventually be consumed by Maddie, my mother’s dog, who I keep forgetting exists. Whenever I step out of the car, I am attacked by forty pounds of blind, canine affection, which includes a lot of dirt. I remember meeting a girl from Emory who claimed she’d “trained her dogs in Italian”. (I couldn’t bring myself to tell her that they responded equally well to food and English.) Maddie, on the other hand, was trained by accident. “No, Maddie, Down!” does nothing whatsoever, but “Shit, Maddie! DRY CLEAN ONLY!” works like a charm. As I stood in my mom’s kitchen, eating truffles from North Atlanta Psychiatrics and explaining the woes of my privileged, private-university life, I kept hearing this… sputtering, pooting noise. Sort of like farting, but like… a small rabbit farting. I couldn’t figure out where it was coming from until I looked down and saw Maddie with some godforsaken toy nearing the end of its life-span. It used to squeak. Now it violently poots. No appropriate onomatopoeia exists for that sound, I realized. It’s been bothering me all day.

It’s weird to be home, and even weirder that I’ll be staying here for a while. An entire month without sitting in the library, or explaining to homeless people that the change rattling in my pocket is just a lot of keys. I miss New York. It’s pretty magical at Christmas. Well, if you’re in the right places.

Your Menorah is a fire hazard.

I say that as if there were any chance of my depressingly industrial cinderblock-building ever burning down.

Dammit, NYU housing. Every other building used to be either a hotel or an apartment complex. Apparently mine was either a psych ward, a kindergarten, or some twisted combination of both. In order to perk up my otherwise sterile hundred-square-feet, I recently put up an eight-by-twelve foot mural of mountains and an alpine lake. I couldn’t get the shelving brackets off the wall, so it’s a little lumpy, but if you unfocus your eyes, it’s perfect. Of course, the mural was meant to be wallpapered, so it’s made of eight posters, all of which have fallen down on me while I’m in bed at one point or another. (This is one of many reasons why I’m not sleeping well. I have taken enough Advil PM in the last four days to sedate a Yeti on speed. I am a medical marvel.) I recently bought a four-foot, artificial Christmas tree from K-Mart (a real trailer-trash move on my part. Still amazed that I managed to sneak it into the building.) that would blend in great with the mural were it not for the fiber-optics. (Like the mural, it is also a lot prettier when I unfocus my eyes.)

I think I need to go outside.

I’ve spent a lot of time in the library over the last few weeks.  When I first got here, I was told that NYU’s library is the “most suicidal” in the country. Now I understand why. Several years ago, two swimmers swan-dived to their deaths simultaneously from the top floor. (Consequently, there are a lot of jokes about the “diving team”.) Nets were installed, and later, hockey-rink-esque plexiglass panels.

NYU is the only place on earth I can think of where I would actually dress up to go to the library. This is not a popular place for freshmen. Most of the people up here with me are graduate students who look like they walked out of a J. Crew catalogue, sipping from their giant Starbucks cups and clacking away on their tiny, tiny macs. I have never seen so many Starbucks cups. Not even at starbucks. I felt out of place with my sweatshirt and diet coke, so I went and bought some argyle. I thought of a name for this new sub-genre of people. Yupsters. Not quite hipsters, not quite yuppies. It’s already catching on.

What’s even more depressing than spending hours in here is the thought of actually living in here. Someone did that a few years ago because his financial aid package didn’t give him enough to cover housing. If my roommate, a very talented Journalism student, is ever at a loss for an article topic, I will highly reccomend that she track down and interview this man. “Bobst Boy: A Retrospective.”

Alas. I am not writing a retrospective on Bobst Boy. I am staring absentmindedly through the window at the park, waiting for that creepy old Ukrainian man with the wolf-hybrid to walk by again, or that homeless guy with the Burger King crown… no luck. 

What have you killed with your bare hands lately?

This weekend, I came home for the first time since I moved to New York. It’s weird to be back. I haven’t worn a seatbelt in months, and I forgot that my mother owned a dog. Still, I’d rather be in Atlanta for Thanksgiving. There’s something about the Macy’s Parade that makes me hate America.

A lot’s changed since I’ve been gone. My aunt started working as a clerk in the Carroll County Probate Court, making her a magnet for all of the idiosyncrasy that West Georgia has to offer. Consequently, I’m getting a concealed weapons license for Christmas. Apparently they’re all the rage.

Sometimes I worry that my family is too dysfunctional, or too Southern, or that if I ever bring a boyfriend home from north of the Mason-Dixon line, he’ll be scared away by my racist Grandmother. Of course, then I hear stories that make us seem extremely normal in comparison.  For example, my cousin’s friend decided that there’s no real sport in hunting deer with a gun or a bow, so he tried to take down a buck with his bare hands, mano-a-casco. He shot and field-dressed a doe, nailed its organs to a tree, and placed a large bucket of water underneath it. He then climbed the tree and waited. Minutes later, a buck wandered over, and as it started to sniff the tree, he jumped on top of it, held its head underwater, and drowned it. (What impresses me the most isn’t that he killed the buck, but that weighing two hundred and fifty five pounds, he managed to climb a tree without severely injuring himself.) To my knowledge, the last thing someone in my family killed was a squirrel that had a very unhappy encounter with a lawn mower. So, we may be eccentric, but at least we’re not violent. 

…Says the girl getting a concealed weapons license. 

It’s not that I’m racist. It’s that two people I dislike just happen to be Asian by coincidence.

One of the reasons I chose to live in my building was that it “has a gym”. What I didn’t realize, as I filled out my housing forms, was that by “gym” they meant “room with two ancient treadmills and rusty free weights.” (Mmm, tetanus. Every college student’s dream.) It has character, for lack of a better word. One of the mirrors is broken in such a way that it looks like someone was flung off of one of the treadmills against the wall. Naturally, I imagine it was one of the people I hate, like those two, rail-skinny Asian bitches who are always, without fail, using the treadmills. “I think the bulimia was working, guys,” I thought to myself. “Come on, y’all, this is overkill.” Consequently, I do most of my exercising between eleven at night and one in the morning. By this time, the only other people in the basement are the maintenance staff. They seem to think I’m a little strange, but given that they work at NYU, I’m dead certain they’ve seen worse, and they commend me on my quasi-athletic efforts nonetheless… I think.

Earlier tonight, one of my floormates caught me on my way downstairs and said, “Jesus, Holly. How often do you go to the gym?” I was torn. Do I let her think I’m basking in a former, cross-country glory interrupted by a tragic injury, or do I explain that my “exercise” typically consists of a twenty-minute run and a forty minute-shower? I told the truth. It felt weird. It’s true, someone with athletic skills this poor probably should not have running shoes this nice. But believe me, as soon as one of those Asian girls drops into a diabetic coma (or whatever happens when your blood sugar plummets), I will be there on that 35 year old treadmill, plodding out my eleven-minute miles, listening to shitty music on my fancy iPod. In other words, living the dream.

Those old treadmills… I’ve always had a weird affinity for not-quite-antique, not-quite-retro things. My mother’s old ski jackets, for example, or Windows 95. Nothing, however, can compare to my father’s microwave. While my childhood friends would show off their Furbies, Tamagatchis, and Wishbone VHS tapes, I would show off the microwave. It probably weighs about as much as I do and takes up an entire counter. “Guess how old it is?” I would ask, challenging my guests as we watched our macaroni and/or fishsticks swivel and splatter in the stoically aging appliance. The answer: 27. It only occurred to me recently that a 27 year old microwave could be leaking radiation into the kitchen. (This could explain some things about my family.)As a result, I no longer watch my food cook… from up close.

I talked to my dad today, and apparently the microwave melted its last piece of Tupperware this morning. It’s a strange feeling, like someone I know has died. (Actually, that’s a lie. It’s nothing at all like actual grief.) This means, though, that my dad’s going to have to buy a new microwave… and I never learned how to use a microwave manufactured after 1980. I mean, the “popcorn button”? What kind of bullshit is that? Two minutes and forty-seven seconds on high. Popcorn perfection. Everyone knows this, or so I thought as a child. I usually do well with change, but it’s the little things that get to me, like the day I saw Mentos in a box instead of a roll. I’m going to miss the microwave. It was around for so many important things. My dad’s graduation from law school, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the fall of the Berlin wall, really every major event in the history of my family, and 14 Olympics. As millions of people’s lives were being turned upside down, I was probably standing there by the microwave, hoping my Chinese leftovers wouldn’t explode. Which, in a way, probably also counts as living the dream.

Too full of shit to quit.

I used to think I loved living in New York because it encouraged me to be myself. As it turns out, it encourages me to do the opposite: compulsively lie to strangers. After all, this is a rare and special treat for someone coming from a community where everyone knows everything about everybody. I think it’s more or less harmless; the problem is that it’s addictive.

            On one of my first days here, I was walking over to a friend’s apartment on 3^rd Avenue when a well-dressed, twenty-something guy appeared out of nowhere and started walking alongside me. He asked me, “What are you doing with that vindictive look on your face?”

            “I’m sorry?”

            “You look like you just exacted revenge on someone.” Surely this was some sort of casting scam, or maybe I’d get a free sample of something? I couldn’t tell.

            “Um, nope. I’m just… walking.” This continued for blocks.

            “Listen, do you drink? Can I take you out sometime?”

            “Well,” I replied, in my most normal, casual, matter-of-fact voice, “I would, but my doctor told me it was dangerous to mix alcohol with my AIDS medication.”

He stopped walking, opened his mouth as if to say something, closed it, and then walked away. “I can’t believe that worked,” I thought to myself, and at that moment, I had opened Pandora’s box.

            Now, to a handful of drunken, fair-weather friends, I come from a small town outside of Prague, and “Hri suka!” means “Hello!” in Czech. (It does not. It means, “Burn, bitch” in Ukrainian.)  To the man selling his CD on the corner of Astor Place and Broadway who makes loud, derogatory comments about my appearance, I am a frigid foreigner, die kein Englisch versteht. I have politely declined invitations either because my 27 year old Bosnian boyfriend was in town, or because I was just in New York to celebrate my fifteenth birthday and I already had plans. (Depends on who’s asking.) The list goes on. It’s not a good habit, but I can’t stop. I feel like I’m getting better at it. It’s weirdly gratifying. I keep telling myself that it doesn’t really matter, because I’ll never see these people again… unless, of course, they show up in some of my classes next semester. I don’t really know who they are, either.

We can’t all be Astronauts.

Now that I think about it, in five years, half of my class will be in medical school, and the other half will probably be unemployed. I met someone yesterday who intends to major in Performance Panflute and Medieval Battle Re-enactment. That doesn’t bring to mind many career options, speaking as someone who does most of her thinking comfortably within the box. I worry about this guy. From his hygiene, one would think he was raised by animals. Not wolves, though. Something weirder, like capybaras.

 I don’t really know what to make of these people who are still viciously trying to live their dreams. I guess the way I see it, there’s a fine line between being ambitious and being deluded, and I spent more than my share of time on the wrong side. Were I to actually accomplish all of the things I set out to do as a child, it would take entire rainforests to print a single copy of my résumé. So, I gave up on my dreams of writing a best-selling novel or winning an Oscar, and I’ll probably become what my mother predicted when I was in the seventh grade: a Spanish teacher. I’m okay with that now. We can’t all be astronauts.

I wish the things that I’m really good at were more marketable. If fishing for compliments were an actual sport, I’d have my own Saturday morning show on ESPN. (Of course, if time management were a sport, I’d be like Australia in the Winter Olympics.) I used to think I drew pretty good cartoon animals until I realized I was just drawing the same body with different ears. I’m a decent singer in that I can stay on pitch within an Asian-quarter-step or so. I used to be a model, but at 5′1″, I have low expectations for that career (no pun intended). I can successfully reset the clock on my VCR. I have ghost-ridden-the-whip. These could all be somewhat impressive, just not on paper.

It’s not that I lack direction or potential. I just think that in some cases, there’s a lot to be said for letting life run its course. I waited until the last minute to write my college application essays, my excuse being that I was providing a realistic example of my work. Speaking of realistic examples of my work, it’s time to discuss a hundred years of Russian Jewish history. My poor, Protestant self does not belong in that class. My TA tried to reassure me, “Don’t worry. If you speak German, you should understand a lot of the Yiddish.” I neglected to mention that I still struggle to make adjectives and nouns agree.

One of these days, I’ll get a real job.

I’ll have to. It’s only okay to be broke as long as I have a meal plan (the dead moth and expired Metro Card that currently reside in my wallet aren’t scoring me much food otherwise), and I’ll eventually have to take “High School Mascot” off my résumé and replace it with something legitimate. Until that day comes, I’ll probably continue spending my summers as a camp counselor. Spending six weeks in the middle of nowhere can be pretty gratifying if you’re being paid to build campfires, start lanyards and teach people’s small children how to shoot things with bows and arrows. Not to mention that summer camp is a hotbed of case-study possibilities for child psychologists.

`I once had a camper who thought human hair was a perfectly legitimate form of dental floss. Another girl would achieve just the right ponytail, which I believe is the Samurai-topknot of middle school cheerleading, and repeatedly hair-spray it into starchy perfection between activities. The list goes on… the interchangeability of bras and bathing-suit tops, the status assigned to braces and deodorant use, and the misinformed sincerity with which some nine-year-olds try to explain sex to their friends who haven’t had “the talk” yet.

I suppose there are other summer jobs with better pay, but I doubt that sitting behind a desk, answering a phone and playing Minesweeper (as good as I am at all three of those things) would really inspire me to set and achieve new leadership goals for myself. Plus, as I always say, spending time with small children is one of the best forms of birth control.

High-School Math Textbooks Gave Me Unrealistic Ideas About What Diversity Means.

When I got my first college acceptance letter, I tried to picture myself in that standard, propaganda-pamphlet photograph, sitting under some trees in front of a brick building with a black kid, a Latino kid, an Asian kid, a Native-American, and someone in a wheelchair (who still looked normal from the waist up and didn’t make anyone uncomfortable). Amazingly, our school colors would flatter everyone, and we could all be spirited in our sweatshop-free college t-shirts without looking jaundiced. We would discuss Proust, Kierkegaard, or someone of literary importance that I’d never heard of. After expanding ourselves intellectually, a Frisbee would gently land near us, and everyone, including the kid in the wheelchair, would take a well-earned break. In other words, I’d spend four years living in an L.L. Bean catalogue.

 As it turns out, I ended up at NYU, which (as far as I can tell) is a pretty far cry form a normal university. I do sit in under the trees in Washington Square Park on a daily basis, although I’m typically in the company of tourists, Greenpeace activists, and a schizophrenic homeless man named Ricky who wears a Burger King crown and caution tape, none of whom can help me with my Spanish homework. The student body here is definitely diverse, just not in ways that I expected. I think I picked one of the only schools in North America where being a white Protestant makes me a minority. On Yom Kippur, the dining facilities in my building were closed, and now I’m very concerned about Ramadan.

In an attempt to put off a required expository writing class, I signed myself up for “Soviet Jewish Literature” instead, not knowing that I would be the only non-Jew in the class. (I’m also a blonde German major, which doesn’t help.) I’m yet to establish myself as a competent, contributing class participant, especially after making such comments as, “Oh, Shabbat means Sabbath,” or “Talmud… I don’t think that book’s in the Bible. It might be in the Apocrypha.” Likewise, I’m the only Southerner taking Sociolinguistics this semester. Fortunately, it’s not as obvious, since I’m not from Birmingham, Alabama or eastern Tennessee, and I’ve learned some really “useful” skills… like how to diagram exactly what it is about Boston accents that makes me want to hurt myself or someone nearby.

The social scene here is a bit off, too. I’ve been told that college is where I’ll make the friends that I’ll keep forever, but when I imagine some of these people at my wedding, I imagine cake smeared on the walls, or wailing and gnashing of teeth. I have to remind myself that it’s still early.

Anyway, whenever I think I’m surrounded by the some of the world’s strangest characters, I think about my dear twin sister Anna, who currently attends the University of Chicago… and I feel a little bit better.