Shit gets downright majestic here in Appalachia.

This week, on the local public radio station, Nick and I accidentally tuned into a call-in show called "Sell Phone." Local listeners call in and candidly describe the item they're hoping to sell (" '92 Cavalier, looks good, runs good") and leave their phone number for interested buyers to call. Like some sort of analog Craigslist. Awesome.

INT. My house in Athens - mid morning

EVIE cracks the front door to find a disheveled-looking COLUMBUS standing there. There are dark circles under his eyes.

Evie: What are you doing here?
Columbus: I just... Can we talk?
Evie: This isn't really a good time.

Columbus: Please. Just..a couple minutes. I need to sort though some things.

Evie: Okay, okay, come in. But..being here is just going to upset you more.

Columbus: OU sweatshirt? Go team.
Evie,defensively, tugging at sweatshirt: What? Aw, c'mon, you know I like vintage-looking bullshit.
Columbus: No, it's cute. Um, very college.
Evie: Did you just come here to make fun of me?

Columbus, massaging temples: No, no, of course not. (looking around) This..this is what you want?

Evie: It's what I want right now. It's...easy here. Peaceful.

Columbus: So everytime life gets hard, you leave?

Evie: You're not being fair. I'm just..charmed, I guess. Athens recycles, you know? It's refreshing.

ATHENS, shirtless with messy bedhead, ambles down the stairs, scratching his bare stomach. ATHENS regards COLUMBUS and EVIE intensely exchanging words and pauses.

Athens, concerned: Is everything cool here, babe?

Evie: Yeah, we're just..talking.
Athens, to Columbus: You hungry, man? I was just gonna scramble up some frit-ta-taas with the eggs and peppers I picked up at the co-op.

Columbus: No, I just lost my appetite actually.

ATHENS leaves, enters kitchen.

Columbus, to Evie: Frit-taa-taas.

Evie: Stop.

Columbus: That guy is an asshole.

Evie: No, no, he's...uncomplicated.

Columbus: He's an asshole.

Evie: Look, I told you I needed space. Can we talk about this during the holidays? You shouldn't even be here.

Columbus: Yeah. Neither should you.

END SCENE

PBR from the future.

B and his friend Crys celebrated B's new tattoo and payday (freaking payday!) by getting me very drunk before 9 pm. They showed me another comfortable dive bar in Athens besides Tony's. Who wants to drink someplace where your shoes don't stick to the floor?

I guess a couple weeks ago they replaced the splintering, hardly-doing-its-one-job-of-being-a-horizontal-plane bar with this acrylic, illuminated number. So now I know what it's like to get bombed on a spaceship.

It's a Wonderful Election Year.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.