Sjanneke's apartment is a bizarre converted attic space. The stairs up the side of the house seem carelessly hammered into place, and the whole thing rattles like a rotting wooden roller coaster when you climb it. All the walls are slanted and the passageways narrow. The oven is freestanding, and the shower's about as roomy as an MRI machine. Sort of the Cabinet of Dr. Caligari meets Charlie Bucket's house.

But she made me dinner tonight so I'll say that it was pretty cozy. Like a treehouse. Or a mine collapse.

The window in my old bedroom. Tough weekend up in my brain.

I've had grand fuckin' plans to get myself together for years. I must've always known I was sort of kidding, deep down. This summer I'll train for a triathlon. This school year I'll do the goddamn dishes instead of drinking coffee out of a soup bowl. In Athens, it's been easy for me to be a person. Running. Eating better. Eating less. Being organized. Managing my time. Getting enough sleep.

But depression is always there, even when it sort of isn't, even if it's mostly white noise. The most docile pet dogs will still draw blood if you surprise them. Just because they sleep in your bed and kiss you on the mouth doesn't stop that electricity in their nerves. They're cuddly, affectionate beasts, but still beasts. And it's more than a beast, it's a bitch. And I'm not sure whether people who haven't experienced it can ever understand. It's not just feeling down. When it's bad, it's jogging uphill through maple syrup with a hangover.

I know this. I know this. But still, I'm embarrassed that after a sunny, productive couple of weeks, I thought I'd somehow "beat it". Like it's a cold.

It turns out I live a few miles from this whole situation.

Ana guiltily killed the black mantis in the kitchen today when she visited. "I'm sorry, little guy, but you have to stop terrorizing Evie," as she snuffed it out with a paper towel tube. Ana is made of railroad spikes.

As we took in the view of the autumn-marbled hills from my back porch, she assured me that I didn't feel far away. "It's like you're at your cabin, working on your novel."

Every couple of days, I'll wake up and forget that I live here. I'll expect to be in my old apartment, or in an ex-boyfriend's bed, or in my tiny trundle bed in the house I grew up in.

FUUUUUCK LEAVE ME ALONE.

As a recent alum of the sprawling leviathan that is (the) Ohio State University, it's not hard to find things to like about Ohio University. All of my classes are in one building. Which is right next to the library. Which is right next to the bureaucratic-jumping-through-of-hoops building. Which is all ten minutes by foot from my house. Ohio State hasn't even had a library for two years. A small, cozy, convenient campus is an alien concept.

Today I had to go to Payroll in order to drop off my direct deposit form. Because I haven't had a source of income since August 25th. And then I bought a bed. And then I bought a camera. And then I paid September rent. So when that stipend check comes on October 1st, I want it fast. I want to melt that stipend check on a spoon and shoot it up between my toes.

Payroll, however, is in some satellite building, a twenty minute walk east of campus into nowheresville. The building itself is oversized, utilitarian, over-air-conditioned: markedly OhioStatesian. When I turn in the form, the woman at the desk apologizes to me for "having to walk all the way out here." Are you kidding me? At Ohio State, I'd have to walk twenty minutes to four different buildings until I found the right office, wait for 45 minutes to be told I'm missing a form, then they'd have me sign away my first born and tattoo Carmen Ohio on my forehead.

This morning, I was doing research on the library computers for my assistantship, compiling articles about social media and the presidential campaign, occasionally pausing to wonder if maybe Barack Obama is courting my vote because he like-likes me. Should I ask him to homecoming? I bet he's been asked like a thousand times already. Then, in a room silent except for the mad clicking of keyboards, someone's phone rings, blasting their "MMMbop" ringtone. It continues ringing, unanswered, until finally a frat dude built like an ox stands up, holds up the phone like a trophy, puts it to his ear and says "Hey, Mom." The room erupts into laughter, and I think, "Holy shit, I'm at work right now." Vast improvement from being verbally abused and coming home smelling like shawarma.

This house is, um, earthy? There are a fair amount of bugs that are just part of the mise-en-scene here at the house. Most of them I can ignore. Beetles, moths, flies, spiders; these guys aren't trying to start any static. My only real hang-up, is the giant praying mantis that hangs out in the kitchen. This guy isn't sylphlike and green and harmless. It looks like a giant roach with wings and T.Rex arms. And it stares at me while I make coffee or unload the dishwasher, rubbing its Zorak arms together, biding its time. Sjannie can back me up on this.

So imagine my horror when I am sitting on the porch swing, laden with textbooks and notes, and notice that the scourge of my homestead has landed on the window next to me. And it twists its creepy head-part around, Exorcism-style, to fix its sight-orbs on me.

And in a flutter of oily roach-y wings, it dive-bombs my face.

I swat at it and scream. It lands on the window again. It turns its head around. It splays its T.Rex arms like that Jesus statue in Brazil. Again, like a laser-guided missile, it goes for my face.

B has come down to investigate the commotion and rattled, but mostly embarrassed, I explain. He sets out to remove the mantis from the porch cautiously with a piece of cardboard, but we both hear the satisfying crunch of an exoskeleton. He sweeps it into the bushes.

We start into a conversation about what a weird night it is, and our theses, and school, and Athens, but it's obvious I'm still on edge. He says to me, "If it makes you feel better, I'm almost certain I killed it."

From the bushes there's a rustle as the undead mantis rises and lands under the eaves of the roof, right over where we're sitting. Both of us jump up, and B grabs a newspaper, dealing the mantis the coup de grace.

The real victim here is my iPod, the screen of which shattered as I leapt from the porch swing and it crashed into the ground.

How to make an iPod shuffle:
Get a regular iPod for Christmas
Wait three years
Move to Athens
Be a giant baby who is afraid of bugs

On my run today I noticed this weed flower, muscling its way into view from behind telephone poles and mailboxes so that half the street was dusted yellow.

It reminded me that it was almost exactly three whole years ago that I spent an important weekend in Freiburg, Germany. It was sometime after the friendliest dive bar served midnight spaghetti. It was probably after we were led to the secret dance party in the warehouse basement. At some point these pink-cheeked boys speaking fast, drunk German approached us as we tread carefully around the tiny canals that vein the city (we learned earlier that day that if you step in a Bächle you have to marry a man from Freiburg) and presented the three of us with enormous stalks of uprooted goldenrod, doffing their newsboy caps with gravitas.

I'm sure that before then, I'd seen goldenrod along the highways and in fields in Ohio, but I never noticed them. Now, and at the risk of sounding saccharine, they're forever linked with that city, and that summer, and being 19, and what a strange, hard, drunk, warm time that was in my life.

My car has weight sensors in the front seats, and if the driver and passenger don't buckle up after the car is started, my little car goes apeshit with worry. It beeps frantically at you until you buckle up already.

My grocery haul got my car all nervous and best as I tried to ignore the beeping, it was maddening.

So, at the next stoplight, I buckled those puppies in.

Always good to be in the company of friends who laugh at my magnetized dick jokes.

When I say I have no friends here, it's terribly misrepresentative. I have exactly one friend here and she is a fucking ray of sunshine. I would take one best friend over twenty drinking buddies any day.

Sjanneke is endlessly wholesome (runs marathons, taught in Africa, works with special needs children), an excellent foil to me. She does things like needlessly abbreviate words and phrases (coffee is coff-coff, the library is the 'brar) - something I find loathsome when others do it and endearing when she does it. She is, in a lot of ways, the exception that proves the rule.

She drove me to Columbus yesterday and this nectarine was blooming out of her car's cupholder, at its ideal hour of ripeness. After I commented (probably crassly), on the nectarine's fleshiness, she insisted on giving it to me. I refused as many times as I politely could.

So it turns out produce can make my day.

I'm not sure whether it was the extra shot in my latte, the way the weather seemed like it was trying to right a personal wrong (sunny and crisp, YES) or the fact that when I set my iPod to random it gave me "Outta Sight (Outta Mind)" by Wilco (usually it saddles me with some painful Nick Cave b-side), but I was out of my skull happy today.

When I was reviewing some basic statistics for my dry research theory class, I thought, "I miss math." For some reason, reviewing all those sigmas and x-bars was like visiting old friends. I guess all this theory and ethics is making my analytical brain act out.

My housemate, B, with whom I have had a benevolently awkward relationship with up to this point, made a huge dinner tonight. So, I take back any silent domestic criticisms I may have had. Dude can cook.

I grew up in a big cozy house in the woods with five people and an unruly dachshund. There was no privacy, there were no closed doors, and near-constant clamor. It was noisy and normal and good.

While intense porch talks with Sjannie are invaluable, there is something to be said for just feeling like you're part of someone's comfortable backdrop. It was nice idly tapping away at a paper while Jason was studying for his candidacy exam or cooking. It was a strange comfort to watch, amused, as Nick set up the TV's picture in picture so that he could play Resident Evil on the tiny screen while I watched Stand By Me on the large screen.

I remember now, that feeling after you've split up with somebody, being tortured by not knowing what they're wearing or eating for breakfast or if they have to work that weekend. In the midst of creating this online record of my trivial bullshit, I didn't realize how much I'd hunger for other people's minutiae.

Look out world, I have half of a staff mailbox!

I was caught taking this picture by one of my professors checking his mail. He quickly realized what I was up to, and nodded respectfully. In his thick Chinese accent he said, "You must take picture. It is very proud time."

It was embarrassing/encouraging.

It became official this weekend when I bought a bike to keep in Columbus: I'm a joint custody kid. This was my first visit "home" since I moved, but I didn't get a lump in my throat every time I remembered that my time there was finite. It just seemed like, "Well, I'd better get back to Athens eventually, that's the only way I'm gonna get any work done." It's not so bad, this sort of split residence. It mitigates the grievances I have with both places. Columbus is still without power. The city of Athens voided my parking tickets. See?

As I was driving back from getting my hair cut on Sunday, extinguished stoplights on High Street like pendulums, the whole stupid town felt like a museum to the years I'd lived there. I saw the shop fronts and the bus stops and neighborhoods through fresh eyes again. Each time I passed a friend's old apartment, I imagined their images burned into the walls there, like an old computer monitor. I passed porches I've cried on, yards I've laid in, intersections where I wiped out resplendently on my bike. I wasn't feeling wistful or overwhelmed. I was just remembering.

Brenda and Lara had their bon voyage party today. They're spending a school year teaching in Spain and France, respectively. The ghost of Hurricane Ike was an uninvited guest, causing tall backyard maples to genuflect and leaving most of Columbus without power. Being at a party during a power outage was a relief, in a way. You couldn't see anyone's face and it was completely acceptable to just stand alone, watching the sky. We took this photo with the aid of flashlights.

I've felt the impact of moving overseas (albeit only for a summer) and I'm still rattled from this regional move. It's not a cinch. They're gonna pull it off with grace, though.

Here is Ana, being socially magnificent.

About what I said about reining in this kind of behavior..

Man, after two teetotaling weeks in Athens, I'm a cheap date.

The first week of class was stormclouded over by all this car keys hassle. Parking tickets were amassing. Businesses were yanking me around. I felt frustrated and impotent, with no end in sight. I couldn't shake the codependent, irrational notion that if Nick was here, he would be able to magically fix it for me.

Today provided some much needed perspective about all the warm bodies out there who give a shit about me. I got two beautifully illustrated letters from Lauren, one of which contained two CDs of new sounds for my earholes. I got a notice in the mail that Ana had bought me a subscription to ReadyMade to balance out all my grueling scholarly reading. My brother drove two and a half hours to hand deliver my CAR KEYS (case of the missing keys closed, by the way: my mom absentmindedly palmed them into her purse last weekend when she visited). And when I reached Columbus, blood sugar on a sharp downturn, Nick had just returned from dinner with his dad at my favorite restaurant and had picked up a carryout sandwich there for me. Seeing that brown takeout box in his fridge for me was like Christmas fucking morning.

Spinach salad with mandarin oranges, goat cheese, ginger vinaigrette.

Ever since Sjanneke and I knew we'd both be living in Athens for grad school this fall, we started making survival plans. Weekly Family Dinners. Scrabble and wine on the porch. Carpooled trips to Columbus to see our respective dudes.

A week passed. Classes started. Today is my long day at school, and after a week of fruitless, HILLY treks around and around this place on my bike trying to track down a key for my car, a spirit-deflating courseload, and meals eaten alone in front of my computer, I needed Family Dinner.

The ominous thunderclouds, the quick-setting sun in a still-strange town, the fact that my back was killing me - I presented myself with an airtight case for waiting several hours for Sjan, and more importantly, her car to be free to drive me to the grocery store. But I'm trying not to be that girl anymore, so I flicked on my bike's headlight and set out to find the "bike path along the river" that I'd heard about. And the scenery as I spun along the bends in the Hocking was vast, saturated green, astounding. As I rode home from Kroger, it was dusky-dark and the gnats along the riverbed were madly spraying me in the face. I was wiping gnats from my cheeks and forehead like mud spatters and laughing out loud to myself at how absurd it was. When I got home and looked in the mirror they were in my eyelashes and the corners of my mouth. I took a shower and Sjanneke came over and we ate forever.

Riding my bike to Kroger for groceries is something I did in Columbus all the time, but I've spent so much time up in my head this week, solitary and unstimulated, that this was practically narcotic. I nearly cried. I don't know. It made me feel like a person.

Before I moved, I thought that it would be the being here that was difficult, and the school part would be fine. Being here is weirdly comfortable. However, any romantic notions about how lovely and interesting it would be to be in graduate school evaporated today. It hit me like a ten car pileup in a dense fog, the sheer volume of time that will not be mine in the next year. I'm a little despondent today, grieving my beer-soaked summer, my lethargic, above-it-all undergrad mindset. I've always had an anaphylactic reaction to trying my hardest. Can you imagine if I was a first year law or medical student? How thin is my freaking skin?

And there aren't even unwitting friends and boyfriends around for me to bitch at! More than likely, that is a good thing. I can't help but feel sorry for myself and I can't help but feel like a baby for feeling so sorry for myself.

I keep thinking of that interchange in Kicking and Screaming:

Jane: Sometimes you can be such a child.
Grover: But if I was a child, you'd find that endearing!

Also, sleeping alone sucks.

So while I shouldn't necessarily encourage these school night visits, I'd be stupid not to soak them up.

Shit can get done tomorrow.

Here I am on my first day of 17th grade.

On my first day of kindergarten, my mom wanted to hold my hand and walk me to the bus stop and wait with me there. I said, "I'm in kindergarten now. I can do it all by myself," and started heading down the driveway. While I'm not as fearless as I was then, with my sailor dress and applique tote bag, I felt pretty level and self-assured today. I'm used to myself.

The most important lesson I learned today was outside of the classroom. Don't ever lose your car's keyless entry fob. Because they cost ONE HUNDRED DOLLARS to replace. It is especially devastating if you've just spent three hundred dollars on books. Ouch.

It's something I constantly fear. That one day someone will just call me out as a complete fraud.

I have a degree in French but I'd really hesitate to call myself bilingual. Do I know what the French word for a tire iron is? No. Could I adequately express in French a complex existential crisis to a friend? Probably not with any success. When my French professors in college would give me good grades or scrawl complimentary notes at the ends of my papers, I'd think to myself,"are they ever gonna feel deceived when they put it together that I don't know what the shit I'm talking about."

Even in relationships. Some dude starts saying sweet things to me and it's like, just wait til you catch me hunched over, clipping my toenails over the trash can in nothing but my Laundry Day granny panties. Then who's beautiful?!

I lost my freaking car keys today and spent four hours looking for them. I turned my room, my house, my car upside down. I had to negotiate a delicate window: I couldn't call my parents too early with the news in case I still had a chance of finding the fuckers, but I couldn't call them too late and needlessly delay having new keys in my fist. My parents, bless their sermonizing hearts, you'd think no one in history of the world had lost their keys before. They echoed all the negative thoughts that had been poisoning my brain all day, cause, yeah, I should slow down and get myself organized and yeah, maybe I am too old for this shit, and yeah, they did help me a lot moving and getting settled last week and do I see how this would be a huge inconvenience for them?

I don't usually wear rings but I bought these this week since I've been in Athens and I keep catching myself staring at them on my fingers, spinning them with my thumb. They look silly on my hands, all bulging knuckles and gnawed cuticles. Like putting a bowtie on a dog.

Even taking this picture made me feel like a fraud; I had my crappy digital camera set to manual and I couldn't remember whether you increased depth of field by increasing or decreasing the f-stop. I looked it up on wikipedia. All those hours spent in my high school darkroom, stinking of fix and developer chemicals, fancying myself a photographer.

I think the breadth of my insecurities fall into the normal/healthy percentile. I'm pretty smart, I'm a good listener, I've kept all my friends around a long time, I'm friends with my exes, I get laid. Tomorrow's my first day of graduate school. I'm gonna keep faking it, I guess.

When I was in high school, my parents declared us a Non-Wal-Mart Family, for all the obvious reasons. However, both of them kept making clandestine visits there, occasionally indulging in a bargain purchase. Mom would remind me, "Please don't tell your father." "Let's keep this between you and me, just this once", my dad would ask. I'm so lucky that money has never been too tight in my family, but my parents did have three kids in three and a half years and there were those strange couple of months in 2002 where the only employed member of my family was my brother. Who was 17. And worked at the car wash.

I know this is the whole point, but I forgot how cheap everything is there!

Here in Southeastern Ohio, it's pretty much Wal-Mart or bust. (No Target? What is this, the third world?) My mom drove two and a half hours from Dayton because I'm certain the thought of me not having a vacuum cleaner had her losing sleep. So, we braced ourselves as the automatic doors gulped us into the fluorescent airplane hangar that is the Athens Wal-Mart Supercenter. I hadn't been in one in years. She insisted on paying but assured me that "I'm not going to take you out shopping again until you need baby stuff." Good one, ma.

This EIGHT DOLLAR wood tray table was part of the Wal-Mart bounty. It seems like a good satellite desk-like surface for when I'm doing research and my computer and books consume all available desk space. Or a breakfast table for the porch swing. Or a place to set my beer(s).

Look at these assholes.

So I lasted, what, two days without seeing these guys? Codependent much? Ana and I spied the same shooting star while sitting on my back porch, shrouded in the dimensionless blackness of being somewhere that looks a lot like nowhere. We split our wish.

Besides Nick and Ana dropping in, the best thing about today was that I learned that I would definitely be able to complete all non-thesis coursework (in other words, all coursework that requires me to be in Athens) before summer quarter next year. Relief. Relief. Relief.

Today I felt inspired to make my bed for the first time in..ten years? Let's call it progress.

I soldiered through new graduate student orientation. This morning as I watched the coffee drip, I thought to myself "more like bore-ientation, am I right?", then gave myself a mental high five. Jenn would have laughed at that.

So I stomached the inspirational bureaucratic dog-and-pony show in pretty good spirits. I learned a long time ago to always pack a snack and a book. It turns out I was guilty of academic misconduct during my undergraduate career according to a handout I received ("forged attendance", "submitting the same assignment in different courses without consent of the instructor"). So there's that.

I don't feel lonely until someone calls and asks if I'm okay.

Farewell Dube meal. This tea is being consumed with a heavy heart.

The first couple of hours here were tentative. I'd be leisurely unpacking my things, listening to Nebraska, when a tidal wave of panic would pull me under without warning. Mostly though, I feel undramatically displaced and sad.

When I studied in France, on my first day of class, my professor encouraged us to make the most of our experience with this French expression: "J'y suis, j'y reste." Literally, it's "Here I am, Here I remain." I've been carrying that around with me. It seems like a sadsack, glass-half-empty version of "Carpe diem."

Jenn's been my roommate for two years, and if I had the patience that this girl possesses in one eyelash, I'd be a much happier person. Every day, I'd come home from work, sprawl out on her bed as she tried in vain to check her Internets or do homework or read and I would talk myself blue in the face. I would not shut up for hours. Jenn is a terribly good sport. Moving out was like getting divorced. Our stuff had merged into one indivisible organism, consuming our entire dank basement apartment.

I'm not sure what I'm going to do with all this solitude. It feels unnatural. I hope I don't start acting like a homeschooled kid.

My most dreaded social snafu is the Double Goodbye. Not only is it awkward, but I'm pretty sure it's unlucky. It occurs when you leave a social situation, make your exit known, say your farewells. Then you get outside and realize you've forgotten your keys! Now you have to re-enter the gathering and sheepishly half-goodbye as you leave. The worst. My potluck was last Friday, but I was still in Columbus for several days after that. So even though everyone said their goodbyes Friday as they left, they ran into me the next night. And then the next night. "Aren't you supposed to be gone?" Double Goodbye. Triple Goodbye. Quadruple Goodbye. It's enough to make a girl go into hiding.

This photo was taken in June at my friends Chris and Erin's wedding party. Most of my summer was this drunk, but nowhere near this buttoned-up. In this picture I'm about an hour short of crashing my bike, getting back on it, and waking up on my friends' couch an hour before my parents were due in town to watch me walk at graduation. Jesus Christ, the sun was bright in that stadium.

It's the twilight of an, um, convivial summer? The debauchery is about to get very, very reined in. Because of the rigorous courseload. And because I have no friends.