In a desperate job search that brought me all the way to Brookline, I picked up some books from the great little local bookstore that Chase and I had visited when vainly trying to see John Krasinski. Sadly two hundred other rabid fangirls had gotten there before us and taken all the tickets. This particular bookstore puts pretty great books on display for often ridiculously low prices. Last time we splurged on Yiddish for Babies, the picture book with a baby on one side and a Yiddish word in a baby-related context on the other. This time, I got The Best Recipes in the World, a seven-hundred-page cookbook, for $10. I also got In the Merde for Love by Stephen Clarke, for $5, about a snarky Englishman whose misadventures in the French countryside begin to fray his idyllic vision of his sexy French girlfriend. So far it’s the best book I’ve read in a long time.
I was rather correct when I envisioned a somewhat hectic beginning to the summer in Boston, but life’s been pretty awesome too. I crashed for five days chez Benji, who very generously not only picked me up from the airport and furnished me an air mattress on a futon, but also fed me, moved me into our new house, taught me how to grill, and introduced me to Arrested Development. I am very grateful to Benji and his housebros for their welcome and hospitality.
That first week, when I wasn’t interning, I was mostly running around looking for paid work. When I’d left Tufts, I had put in a three-hour “training shift” at a restaurant, talked about a probable job at another restaurant, and been called to start right away at a shop for Scandinavian pastries. It turned out the first job had been given away during the week I was in Minnesota, the other restaurant job hadn’t realized I wasn’t full time, and DPH gave me a “training shift” but has yet to schedule another one that will include all of the potential employees, which by the way things are going sound more numerous than actual space for new hires. So I’ve been traversing the Cambridge area by foot for hours on end. Things were getting pretty desperate. I even interviewed for working behind the fish counter at Whole Foods. Cute though the Whole Foods brand may be, in the end a fish counter is simply a counter where fish are sold. “We’re not saving the world,” the gangly, pirate-y-looking fish counter manager told me.
But luckily, just as I was about to sign twenty hours a week away to the fish, I stumbled upon the cute CPK-style pizza place on Mass Ave where I’ll be cashiering a few nights a week. I have never been so excited to operate a cash register.
Happily, the people in the house before us left a lot of stuff. Benji, Emily, and Rebecca helped me move in and steal furniture from other rooms. While we were inspecting the drawers in a desk, we came across some kid’s passport. He must have been abroad to China, judging by the Chinese visa stamped inside. In the drawer below, we discovered graduation tassels heaped upon a stack of Chinese textbooks and International Relations awards.
But the best part was when we opened one of two tiny top dresser drawers to find a DVD of “Girls Gone Wild: Horny School Girls 6.” While my friends thought that my analysis of this situation was creepy, I still think I’m right so here goes: I always thought of Girls Gone Wild as the kind of “porn” that fourteen-year-old boys obtain when they see the commercials on TV and want to watch college girls get in beach fights. “Gateway porn,” if you will. Why would you want a DVD about horny college women when you can go to a frat party? This does not make very much sense to me.
Nonetheless, my friends saw potential for love in this situation. He was an IR major, I was an IR major. He took Chinese, I took Chinese. He went to China, I’m maybe going to China. I don’t consider myself to be a particularly horny individual, but I am a schoolgirl, so it was conceivable that I could even be his type. I facebooked him about retrieving his passport and “some other stuff” (we even had several favorite books listed in common), and a few hours later it was determined that this mysterious gentleman would arrive at nine AM the following morning.
My friends made several suggestions as to how I should go about handing off a passport, textbooks, tassels, and a gateway soft porno to my future husband. One suggestion was to answer the door in full horny schoolgirl dress. Another was to spend most of the morning in the shower. A less cliché suggestion was to invite him in and force-feed him breakfast foods while laying on my academic, girly charm.
The real meeting, as these situations generally work out, was distinctly anti-climactic. The ring of the doorbell struck me as a tad awkward- it was one of those, “Did I just press the doorbell? I… I dunno… I should- ohshit…. K I think it worked that time. Or twice. I dunno” kinds of doorbell rings. I answered the door in normal clothing, and thought to myself that this kid looked about fifteen years old in person. I handed him the heaping grocery bag where I had discreetly tucked his porno in with the Chinese textbooks. “Thanks,” he said, looking sheepishly at the twenty pounds of shit I had just handed him. “Dunno how I missed all this.” By this time he was basically back in his friend’s car.
The bros who had lived here previously left us quite a lot of stuff, including furniture, a grill, kitchen supplies, and a bike. We have some pretty brotastic glasses, including a Sig Ep beer pitcher.
We also got some pretty cheap furniture from a friend, whose house was originally going to sell their furniture to the next leasers but said leasers were little bitches about it. To spite them, they were trying to get rid of every single item of furniture in the house. We got a great kitchen table that is the perfect height for standing up and chopping stuff on with benches that slide underneath.
Here are the pictures of Emily and me showing off the house's hidden treasures:
OK so now it is about a week or maybe two weeks after the above was written. FYI.
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