What We Think About Being By Ourselves :: June 4th, 2002 ::
Yesterday, pursuing rumors of anti-war activism and a free wireless network at one of the local libraries, I planned on heading up to Burlington. I would drive there, I thought, sometime in the early afternoon. I would fiddle around, find that library, then at five be at the place that the activists said the would be. It would be great, I thought. But as the day wore on the drive, my growing hunger, and the fading sunlight started making the whole trip a little less attractive, so I put it off, ostensibly for today. Today, I planned on going up to Burlington, not only for the same reasons as yesterday, but also because there was a promise of company once I got there (Jessamyn has old friends who live up there, apparently). But then suddenly I became obsessed with cleaning and organizing this place, as if possessed by some weird nesting instinct. Or else maybe it was just because I felt my life was being overtaken by old newspapers and computer equipment. In any event, the resulting cleaning frenzy ate up most of my morning, and left me feeling very unmotivated to go anywhere in the afternoon.
So the overall effect? I’ve spent the past couple of days hanging around the house. Which has been fine, definitely, though it has given me quite a bit of time to think about — who would have thought — phone messages. Specifically, I’ve been thinking of the weird phone messages I’ve gotten in my life, and which ones have been so peculiar, so funny, so profound, or so emblematic of the state my life was in when I received them, that I found it necessary to keep them, sometimes for weeks or even months.
One message I was particularly taken by I got when I was in college. It was my Sophomore year. See, I’d written a story earlier that year; it was a piece of fiction that, though I might find it puerile now, I thought was quite profound and thoughtful and elegant at the time. It was, beyond a doubt, the best thing I’d ever written. I was so sure of myself that I submitted it to the campus literary review for publication. I waited for a response from them. And I waited. Finally I heard from the professor in charge of the campus literary review called me, and left the following on my machine:
Hey there, Greg, it’s, uh, um [cough]. Yeah, just wanted to let you know, um, good story, and, uh, expect to see it in this year’s issue of The Review. Uh, yeah. Good.
[There was an indecipherable muffling, and I was expecting the phone to hang up, But then he came back].
Oh, uh, by the way: you use the phrase “being that” a lot to start off your sentences. That’s wrong. Well, it’s annoying. You should change all your instances of “being that” to “since.” OK.
[click]
What does this show? I really don’t know. But it’s a fun memory that involved phone messages. Which, as I mentioned, is what I’ve been thinking about lately.
Oh, and in case you’re getting worried that all this isolation is finally getting to me, worry not: I’m off to Burling tomorrow. And this time I’m serious.
