My dad had a request for Father’s Day this year.

Normally, my family members are champions of the Hegelian dialectic, with our “don’t get me anything! I don’t need anything! I’m just happy to see you!” v. our “but of COURSE I’m getting you something. Don’t be silly. Help me out here!” It always makes sense in the moment.

When we were younger, my two sisters and I, we were Father’s Day cliches, and always got my father a tie. He would smile and wear it the next day and we felt like kickass little gift-givers. Christmas would come around and we’d wonder what to get our dad and we’d think, “Gee, you know what he seems to like?  Ties.  Maybe we should get him another tie.  Not green though, cause we got him a green one for St. Patrick’s Day” and we would get him another tie.

As we got older, we started to realize that we were being a little lazy, and perhaps he wasn’t as overjoyed at our copious tie gifts as he seemed.

We started trying to be more creative.  We got him tickets to sporting events or something for his car.  We bought him dinner or an ipod.  You know, grown up things.  Things adults like. And he did like and appreciate them, but we found the more time went on, the more difficult it was to top ourselves. We started getting sort of desperate.  “I bet he’d like… a trip in a hot-air balloon. Because he is oh so very fond of heights.” “We could get him a metal baseball bat to put on his desk.” “What do you think he’d think of… a microwavable bowl?”

It all got so much more complicated.

When I was a kid, things were so easy. Giving, receiving, believing… they felt so natural. And as I’ve grown up, I’ve grown a little harder, a little more suspicious of motives and sincerity. I recognize the present face. That’s part of growing up, obviously, but I’m realizing now that eight-year old me wasn’t wrong about everything, and seventeen year old me got some things very wrong.  Part of being an adult I think, is realizing that, terrifyingly, sometimes people are sincere.

My dad asked me for a tie last night. He never gets ties for himself, see.  He always loved the ties we got him, and he thought they were special because his daughters got them for him. And his ties are starting to fray now.  So I went and bought him a tie today. It’s not a very good Father’s Day gift, but I think it might be perfect.

I played soccer for most of my life until an ankle injury/a terrible, demoralizing, creepy coach ended my career. I was never a great player, but I was surprisingly fast, surprisingly tough for someone shorter than most of the other girls on the field. It didn’t matter that I had no hand eye coordination (except for that one time in 3rd grade when my coach inexplicably decided to put in me goal to “try it out” and I let in approximately 6 goals in one quarter and came off the field at half-time glaring at him and telling him that if he EVER did that again I would sit by the goal post and we’d see how his experiment would go THEN). Because I was so small, I got pushed over a lot, but I got very good at doing a sort of roll and spring back up thing that always surprised the people I was playing against. I was scrappy, basically, and soccer was important to me.

I remember the 1999 World Cup very vividly. It was an important moment in my life, to see people talking about female athletes that positively and with that much enthusiasm. I was 11 at the time, and both my sisters also played soccer. It was a family event, watching those games, and when Brandi Chastain made that penalty shot we jumped around our living room hugging each other and cheering and being so proud of our country and our sport.

Which leads me to the Olympic memory that has been whirling around in my head for days: the 2004 Women’s soccer medal ceremony. It was the last hurrah for that core of women who had been my heroes, Mia Hamm, Brandi Chastain, Joy Fawcett, Julie Foudy, and Kristine Lilly. So when they won the gold medal, the whole team climbed onto the medal stand, linked arms, and just belted the national anthem. They were awful, but it was beautiful, and I cried like a baby.

It’s a summer Olympic memory, obviously, and I don’t really know why I’ve been thinking about it. I guess it’s because I’ve been sort of wondering why the Olympics have always meant so much to me.

The 1996 Olympics were my first experience with obsessive fandom. (I think I taped every single hour of NBC coverage that year (without their expressed written consent, because I was a rebel). I had books about athletes, I knew absolutely everything about the Magnificent 7 (the gymnastics team, not the movie), I read every word of the newspaper sports page and cut things out of it to save. I loved it. And I think, in retrospect, some of my wonder and fascination was the novelty of seeing grown-up, women athletes respected and celebrated. At the time, though, I just felt the pull of patriotism and team work.

I’m a sucker for teams. Despite a sort of natural tendency towards solitude, I am most proud of myself and my work when I am contributing to a team, when people depend on me and I am forced to depend on others. My favorite movies, my favorite TV shows, my favorite books… they almost always feature some sort of team, some sort of self-made family. The Olympics are like my ultimate reality show dream, because everyone belongs to a team, and every victory is about more than that individual’s success.

And so, I will miss these Olympics. Yes, even curling. I still say some chimney sweeps happened upon a giant’s dart board and decided to go ice bowling, but I will still miss it.

I can remember feeling overwhelmed in 1996 by the scope of the thing, by the ability of people and countries to put aside their difference even if it was just for two weeks and try and do something bigger than themselves. I felt proud, and not just of my teams, of the United States– I was proud of people. I know now of course that the Olympics aren’t as pure and simple as I thought they were when I was 8.

But I can’t quite let go of that feeling.

I’ve had relatively good luck with living situations in college.  I mean, I’ve had roommate drama two years and neighbor drama one year, but my dad once had a roommate who stole his underwear, so I choose to look on the bright side.  This year, my fourth and final year in college, has been very peaceful by and large.  That is, until last week when a famous literary character was plucked from the pages of a novel and took possession of a cat that lives outside my window.

I’ll back up a little.  My freshman year, I lived in a suite with five other girls.  My roommate and I were the only two that didn’t rush a sorority.  Now, I know plenty of sorority girls who are thoughtful, hard-working, and kind.  And then I know some who seem to enjoy embracing all the negative stereotypes about sorority girls and carrying them around proudly like a trophy.  This group was an even split.  One of my less favorite ones liked to come into our room and gossip about the others and about chapter drama with my incredibly uninterested and increasingly annoyed roommate.  I would sit at my desk, put in my headphones, and thank God I didn’t look nearly as friendly as my roommate.

Sophomore year would be better, I thought, but alas, one roommate decided she hated another roommate half way through the year, for reasons I still can’t quite wrap my head around, and I ended up refereeing an honor duel that only one person knew the terms of.  It was odd and actually sad.

Last year, I thought I had it made.  My own room.  A roommate I knew very well and got along with very well and who was low maintenance like me.  I didn’t count on moving in above some combination of Pete Townshend and a monkey with a banjo.  At all hours of the night, he would practice.  He did not improve.  One day, 4 in the afternoon, he spent an hour– an HOUR– playing the opening riff to Day Tripper.  Then came the White Stripes.  And it wasn’t just his terrible playing, it was an inappropriate desire to play his music loudly enough for the whole block to hear.  That’s why one early Monday morning at 3, he decided it was the perfect time to put the Beatles’ White Album so loudly it shook my bed.

At first, I rationalized.  ”He’ll stop soon.  No one is THAT obtusely inconsiderate.”  Then, I got angry.  ”SHUT UP YOU SUCK SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP!” I yelled one day, jumping up and down on a loose floor board in my room so it snapped down loudly.  I’m sure he didn’t even hear it or if he did, he though the ghost of Keith Moon was joining him for a jam session.  I started angrily jumping up and down on mornings I had to wake up early after his stupid music kept me up.  My roommate, who could hear the music at night but whose room was far enough away that her room didn’t shake and vibrate with the sound as mine did, laughed at me and told me he probably just thought a crazy giant lived up in my room.

Unfortunately, through a combination of my own cowardice and awkwardness over letting it go on so long before saying something, I avoided actually confronting him about it.  I rationalized that he obviously wouldn’t care anyway.  I started to imagine ellaberate revenge fantasies, usually involving me outside his window at odd hours of the morning with a bullhorn, or setting off my roommate’s car alarm for long periods of time before stopping just long enough for him to think it was finally over, and then starting up again.  In the end, I did nothing.  I was not sorry to move out.

This year has been incredibly peaceful.  Other than the occasional late night Rock Band session (on weekends, thank God), my current neighbors are far more considerate.  No roommate drama.  No housing drama.

And then last week, she came.  It was 3 in the morning and I, a very light sleeper, shook awake with the loud– no, piercing– cries of a cat.  I fumbled around for my glasses and looked out my window.  In the parking lot to the building next door, which my window overlooks and which I do not have access to, there was a cat.  There was nothing around her, nothing attacking her.  It was, you know, not that kind of crying.  She wanted a boy cat.  And she was expressing her desire louder than I had ever heard any cat in my life.  It went on for an hour.  Sleep was not an option.

I woke up the next morning, exhausted and grumpy and told one of my roommates.  ”Oh yeah,” she said.  ”I heard that!  Weird.”

“WEIRD?” I thought.  ”That wasn’t weird, it was infuriating and exhausting!”

I got through my day and rationalized it wouldn’t come back again.  It would go look someplace else.

On night four of “Catnip Theater: In the Heat of the Night,” I started to have my doubts she would every go anyplace else.  Exhaustion turned to paranoia and punchdrunkeness.  I spent 15 minutes one night looking for a spider on my bed that turned out to be a shadow from my bed sheets.  And still, she returned.  I started to wonder if this was more than just an ordinary cat.  If she was perhaps possessed by something outside of herself.

“Heeeeeaaaaathcliffff,” I thought she screamed.  ”HEEEEEAAAAAATTTHHHCLIFFFFFF!”

The parking lot, with its giant puddles and overgrown weeds, was sort of like a moor.  It made sense.  This was no ordinary horny cat.  This cat was an idiot in love.  I hated her worse than ever.

She finally gave up on Friday.  I haven’t heard from her all week.  Part of me thinks she disappeared back into her book.  Part of me thinks her biological time was up.  Part of me thinks she’s gone to haunt another moor/parking lot, in search of her lost love.  I don’t know for sure.  All I know for sure is that sleep is a beautiful, beautiful thing.

note: this story is reposted and expanded on from something I posted elsewhere on the Internet.

Last Friday was so glamorous for me.  I mean, all of my Fridays are glamorous, but this one in particular was like out of a movie.  Unfortunately for me, it was out of a bad romantic comedy, and it was an experience of the “before she meets the man and realizes that taking risks and making an effort is WORTH it”  variety.

I work a student job at my college.  It’s a good job, pays well and the people I work for are nice and understanding.  There are days, weeks even, when I just have nothing at all to do but stare at my computer screen and wait for the time to pass.  Douglas Adams wrote that time is an illusion, and lunch doubly so, but I don’t think time is an illusion so much as it is an instrument of torture.  Friday afternoons at work, doubly so.

Eventually, assured by a co-worker that they would have nothing more for me to do that day, I bailed out early and went home to do laundry.  I had no clean clothes left. None. Frankly, the stuff I was wearing that day wasn’t really clean, but you do what you gotta do.  At least my underwear was clean.  Of course, it was my last pair of clean underwear, so again it becomes apparent why laundry was a pressing issue.  I actually got the people at the grocery store to take pity on me and give me quarters the other day, so armed with my quarters, I proceeded to do an embarrassing amount of laundry.

I’m graduating from college in a few months, and I feel a little lost.  This is certainly not an unusual or noteworthy experience, but we all do what we can to get through it, and writing and reading have always helped me focus and feel connected to the world in some way.  I’m afraid of sharing my writing, though, basically because I’m a complete coward. But no more!  (That’s a lie, I’m still a fucking coward, now I’m just going to be a coward who posts shit anonymously on the internet).

I’m trying to commit myself to using this space to regularly post personal essays and anecdotes that I’ve spent a little time working on.  Hopefully they’ll be worth your time– make you laugh or teach you something or whatever.  I have a habit of attracting sort of ridiculous situations, and I like telling stories, so this will mostly be my story-telling space.  Like an Irish pub!  I will probably also talk some about politics, because I need to get a good rant out of the way sometimes, and history, which I love.  I’m also mildly (okay, extremely) obsessed with television, so when it’s relevant, I’ll probably talk a little about some of my favorite TV shows.

Additionally, I’m going to be using the two pages up top, “What I’m watching now” and “What I’m reading now” to write shorter things and immediate reactions to books and tv shows.

Anyway, thanks for reading, and come back soon.  I’ll hopefully be posting a few times a week, and I’d love to hear what you think.

Wednesday