lindsayliveshere.org

Real mail

I love real mail. I just got this postcard from Eliina yesterday, perfectly timed to coincide with what I needed to hear.

Plus! Deanna sent me a lovely I-miss-you card, in our tradition of random card-sending.

Stuck

The Buick was trapped, rather mundanely, in the slushy ice pile by the side of the road outside my apartment this morning. I could feel the sadness in her spinning wheels. I wanted to say, “Listen, old girl. I know it’s rough, being you, deep into your silver years, constantly plastered in bumper stickers about being happy. You probably just want some rest now and then.” But there’s no way to console an object. And I really just wanted to get out of my parking space.

Ok, so I did it.

This site has moved to Word Press. If anyone has a site with a custom template hosted on their own server, like I did at Blogger, here are the steps to transfer:

1) Create a blog at www.wordpress.org.

2) Turn your Blogger blog into a BlogSpot blog temporarily.

3) Go to the “import” section of your new Word Press blog and follow their simple directions.

(And before I did anything, I used Fetch to download my entire site in case of complete failure. What can I say. I’m paranoid.)

Once I figured out how to do it, the steps were relatively painless… Except that I had to watch a tiny scroll bar import posts one by one, all 1,248 of them, and I thought that perhaps the whole shebang would collapse in on itself and I would be punished for my desire to have a well-organized site that’s up to the standards of the year 2008. WordPress is also decidedly automated, not really my style, but it gives me time to fiddle with a custom template without having something temporary that looks too horrible. I sort of feel like my grandfather must feel about cars, how they used to be so simple, you could pop the hood and see all the moving pieces and change the alternator yourself. Now everything is so slick and glossy and run by robots. Well. It’s faster, anyways. And in the end, for now, a better place to be.

Migration?

This site began on Geocities.com. Within a few months, the page moved to AOL, where my family had dial-up Internet access. (Whee!) Publishing was then ad-free and involved a manic, clunky WYSIWYG editor. From there, we went to Northwestern’s “Pubweb” system which was free space for every university student. I think this no longer exists. In 2001, Blogger came into my life. It was run by a dude named Evan, who often posted frantic notices about outages and the hours he’d stayed up to fix all the problems by himself. Then Google bought Blogger, I assume Evan is a millionaire, and …. Now I’m looking for something spicier. So I’m investigating WordPress. I’ll let you know how it turns out.

Snowing like madness

I’m staring out my window, watching snow fall through the white glow of a streetlight, listening to the Smashing Pumpkins’ 1979, which always makes me think of senior year of high school, driving around back roads in the truck I borrowed from my parents, with Bethany, Paul and Deanna. The streets were so quiet, we were so bored that the mere act of driving around was exciting, everything was half-built — subdivisions sprouted identical houses in the middle of farmland.

I used to love watching snow fall through the streetlight in front my house, wishing so deeply for a snow day, carefully calibrating my snow-dar and sending all my wintry prayers into the clouds. Everything was more exciting. Driving to Janelle’s house was heart-stopping. The fastest route took me down a one-lane road through wide-open fields, with deep ditches on either side. Deanna’s house was nearly unreachable sometimes, down a long gravel lane. And if we were lucky, the snow kept going, on into the morning, and my little sisters and I waited, in our pajamas, with our plastic yellow boom box as the AM news station announced the school closings. Also, this happened once (written in ’02… I think this happened in 2000):

Pol and I were driving in icy ski country a couple of years ago. We’d just inched up a steep hill in his Jimmy, and found ourselves on an empty, slippery road with nowhere to go but forward. We slid and fishtailed slightly, and I got really scared we were going to end up in a ditch. I had no concept of what it felt like in a ditch, if we’d roll over, if it’d hurt. But then we started to slowly glide diagonally across the road. Suddenly I was resigned to it. I braced myself, but it was out of my hands. Imminent. We just ended up at a 45 degree angle, unhurt, and flagged down a truck to tow us out.

Panic

Went to Dave and Buster’s tonight. Saw three of my old students. Was already buzzed on a complex pink rum drink so of course, was psyched at first. Said hey, introduced Kevin, asked how they were. Cortez, Adrian, Taniqua: I remember where you sat, the way you cocked your head to say are-you-serious?, the bubbly curves of your handwriting, the way your homework looked like it’d been through the washing machine, how you passed around hand lotion every ten minutes, how you kept a comb in your hair all the time, how your uniform shirt was always inside-out, how you never had a pencil. None of you ever had a pencil.

On the el ride home, panic set in — I hadn’t done enough, I couldn’t remember their names at first, I was supposed to have a lesson ready for tomorrow. Back at home, writing this down, I am trying to re-grasp reality, that they are not my job anymore, even though they said the school is worse. Walk away, Ms. Muscato, walk away.