My friend, Babor

Living in this communication-saturated world, unsolicited commercial email (UCE or "spam") is pretty much inevitable. It no longer shocks me when I receive emails from one "Kesha Willow" advertising the sale of "Incredib1e penislong pill" or emails from a person who is named "me" with the subject line "mr. emflynn, get super prices." Why would I address myself with a formal title in my own email, and an incorrect one at that? That's just ridiculous, Mr. Spammer.

The majority of this spam is simple, penis-enhancing messages or codeine offers (discounted at 99 percent!) that don't humanize the sender in any way. I can deal with these types of emails. (And by me, I mean google's spam folder, which neatly disposes of nearly all of the spam within 30 days. Simple, efficient, hands-off. Spam me all day long, spammers! I gots my google team on it.)

But then my facebook messages were infiltrated, and it touched me in a way I didn't fully anticipate.

It was October 2nd, 2010. A Saturday. I received a private message from one "Babor" with the simple subject line, "business letter from Babor, Retired principal officer, Grameen Bank." Here is what Babor told me.

"To: Emily

From: Md. Babor Ali
Managing Director
RASHEEQ FASHION
House-177, Road-10, Block-F,
Bashundhara Residential Area,
Dhaka, Bangladesh.
Email: baborali@gmail.com,
Phone: 01190298727

Dear Emily,

How are you? This is Md. Babor Ali I was your coordinator during your internship at Grameen Bank, in Bangladesh. I got retirement on August, 08, 2010. I start garments business. I am exporting garments from Bangladesh to USA, Europe, Canada, Australia and Africa. As you were my intern please help me to find a buyer from your country or you could start business. It’s a profitable business.
I am providing my business profile bellow.
Profile of our Organization

RASHEEQ FASHION
House-177, Road-10, Block-F,
Bashundhara Residential Area,
Dhaka, Bangladesh.
Email: baborali@gmail.com,
Phone: 01190298727"

"Wow," I thought to myself. "That is a lot of contact information. Seems legit..." I mulled it over for a second. Then I called my sister.

"Did I ever have an internship at Grameen Bank?"
"What? What are you talking about?"
"Oh, nothing. Just curious... have you ever heard me mention the name Babor Ali?"

The fact that this guy had actually found me on facebook is impressive enough. All those privacy settings I set up long ago have to mean something, right? (...right?) Maybe I should be one of the first investors in his budding garments business. Whenever you are on the cusp of the opportunity of a lifetime and yet, at the end of the day, ultimately decide against it, there is always that nagging question: what if? What... if?

What if I invested some of my non-existent money in an out-of-the-blue solicitation from an internship that I never held in a country I've never been to by a man I've never heard of? What if I legitimately became his intern, and helped him build a, as he put it, "business profile," a profile that has more substance than just the name of his "business" with its address? This could be the opportunity of a lifetime. All thanks to Babor!

But, as it usually goes with all things on facebook, I got distracted. I spent an embarrassing amount of time sifting through other people's facebook photos. Sometime later, I signed off. I went about my life.

Because the power of the facebook is stronger than us mere mortals can resist, later that night I signed back on. I checked out the "top news" section that always brims with the daily inanities from friends and acquaintances both close and... not so close. While scoping about, I noticed something. It was a message, a new message for me! What could it possibly say?

"Emily this is Md. Babor Ali. I was doing my job at the Nobel winner organization Grameen Bank in Bangladesh. On August 08, 2010 I got retirement and start garments business. Here in Bangladesh people are poor. For that a lot of man power is cheap here. People established garments factory and sending their product to USA, Europe, Canada, Australia and Africa.
After getting retirement I started this business here and collecting product from factory and sending to those countries. Above mentioned organization I established and doing well. Now I need your help. I have a lot of interns of the globe, they could start importing garment product that produced by the hand touch of the poor people. So now my new initiative is also with the poor people.
Objectives:
• To eradicate poverty,
• To create employment opportunity.
• To meet the appropriate expectations of clients.
• To add substantial contribution into the national exchequer.

Product:
• Knit Fabric: Single Jersey, Heavy Jersey, Pique, Lacoste, Interlock, Eight lock design, Rib, Pleated design, Rib, French terry, Fleece, Collar and cuff of Cotton, Viscose, Modal, Cotton viscose, Viloft, Polyester, Cotton Polyester, CVC, Synthetic, fiber & micro fiber, x-static, and also made of polyamide, tactel, Coolmax, Suplex etc. by making order to renewable garments factory.
• Garments: T-shirt, Polo shirts, Sweat-shirt, Golf-shirt, Tank tops, Kids wear, Jogging suits, Runners pant, Skirolly, Functional wear, Fashion dress, Under garments, Sports wear etc. by making order to renewable garments factory.
• Garments: long sleeves, shorts sleeves, Denim long pants, Kargo short pant for mens, ladies, boys, girls, kids by making order to renewable garments factory.

I am looking forward to hearing from you soon.
Thank you once again.
Best Regards,

Babor."

How, in the name of all that is good and holy, could I attempt to deny Md. Babor Ali my assistance with his new initiative, "the poor people?" Only a truly selfish person would deny importing such "garment product" made by the "hand touch of the poor people" to the United States. Isn't that what our grand country is based upon? But yet, if his cause was so right, why did it all suddenly feel so wrong?

This new email brought forth too many questions. What was a "national exchequer?" Why would he assume that I would know what a "Viloft" or a"Skirolly" was? Why did he spell the word cargo with a "k?"

The more I read, the more I started to notice other things. Why didn't his verb tenses match throughout the sentence? Why didn't he mention my alleged internship at the Grameen Bank anymore?

"Babooooor!" I shouted, shaking my fist at the heavens above. "Why must you do these things to me!?" 

I did not respond to his request. And ever since, my facebook messages have been eerily absent of one Md. Babor Ali from Grameen Bank. Did I mean nothing to him? Did he take me for a fool? Since it's notoriously difficult to get any direct answers from Facebook, I may never be able to answer these questions for myself. I suppose I could try to contact him directly. I mean, I do have all his contact information. I'm just not sure I am ready to trust again...

So if you're interested in investing in a "profitable garments business," let me know. I know a guy.

The Jaded Writer

Though I haven't been doing a lot of actual writing lately, I've been thinking a lot about writing, and that has to count for something. As a soccer coach once informed me, the mental game is 90 percent of the whole thing. So, by the standard of sports clichés, I'm practically all the way there. The tangible evidence of this writing habit of mine comes in the form of one half-written coming-of-age novel, one fleshed out sketch of a dystopian end-of-the-world type novel, and one nearly complete but as-of-yet unedited satirical memoir. There are also the thousands of scraps of paper that are currently falling out from my desk drawers into my lap. They contain scribbled turns of phrases in blue and black (and sometimes pink!) ink that I wrote on bits of newspaper and backs of programs as a reminder of some intriguing story idea or polysyllabic word that I thought sounded fancy. With all this inspiration literally spilling out around me, what more could a fledgling writer possibly need in order to produce that dream of the next great American novel?

The answer, my friends, is whiskey. As a housewarming gift, my friend Tyler bought a bottle of Johhnie Walker Red. Being more of a connoisseur of the Trader Joe's 2010 Charles Shaw variety, I recognized that I may not encounter such a thing anytime again in my near future. So, upon receiving the gift, I promptly hid it from the other house guests in a tall, out-of-reach cupboard behind a container of glow sticks and some unused plastic plates. While I may not have earned the "shares well with others" sticker that day, I had big plans for that Johnnie Red, things far grander than simply being used as shots before the customary Saturday night excursion to the local chinese food restaurant slash top-40 dance club.

For the record, I neither condone nor condemn drinking. Alcohol, when used responsibly, can be a fun, recreational, and (let me emphasize) social undertaking, especially when it comes in the form of five colorful straws inside a dragon-painted scorpion bowl at the aforementioned "restaurant." But with this bottle of Mr. Walker, I wanted it to be different. More meaningful. Less Bieber lyrics, more Brontë prose. Like many other great writers before me, I decided that whiskey was going to help get me there.

In college, my friend Lori convinced me that whiskey and water was the drink of choice of college students, hardened alcoholics, and fledgling writers alike.

"The water hydrates you, and you still get drunk," she told me. Her logic was sound. My hangover-free Sunday mornings were pleasant. Everyone won.

Then there's Faulkner, who was quoted as saying, "the tools I need for my work are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whiskey." What kind of young writer goes against nobel-prize winning American novel-writing William Faulkner? I may be young, but I'm not stupid. 

But, you might ask yourself, aren't you just romanticizing hard alcohol because you are a 23-year old with too many hopes and dreams and not enough real world practicality to know that you shouldn't be drinking alcohol by yourself on some random Tuesday night? To which I would reply: absolutely. Sure, whiskey is not always unicorns and rainbows, but everyone deludes themselves in some form or other. It's like when teenage girls layer on dark eyeliner to make themselves feel like they look older, or when one of my ex-boyfriends used to put on dress shirts when he had to write a final paper. Everyone subscribes to different ways of thinking that help them to transform who they are into who they want to be. For me, a glass of whiskey conjures up the vision of hunkering down over a pad of paper on a snowy wintery night, a drink on the table in front of me, a fireplace at my back, and the entire night free to pretend to be a hardened, wizened, jaded writer exploring the world through words and letting my inner muse wander where she may. Being presented with a bottle of whiskey moved these visions from the back of my mind to my kitchen table.

So thank you, Tyler, for enabling and abetting my writing habit through whiskey. One day, you just may have a book dedication aimed at you in the form of cryptic inside jokes. I'll just have to drink more whiskey to become clever enough to think of something first. And before that, actually finish a novel. But first things first.

Everyone's an (Anonymous) Critic

Yesterday will forever go down in history as the day that this blog received its first negative anonymous comment. Oh sure, you might say, I've been fortunate to fly relatively under the radar and to have all of my fantastically hilarious anecdotes and genuine insights be hidden from popular society on some obscure pun-inspired blog nestled deep inside the google blogosphere. It might even be considered surprisingly lucky, astonishing really, if one were to compare the comments that have appeared on this very blog against a standard Youtube-style comment riddled with amusing mis-spellings and racist undertunes. The fact that I have written for this blog (relatively) regularly for over a year and have survived with only a 151:1 nice-to-mean comment ratio is nothing to shake a stick at. In a way, anonymous comments legitimize this blog. Someone, somewhere, cares enough to post! And it's not my mom! (Sorry, mom. I love your comments.)

The original post, a tongue-in-cheek analysis of the lyrics to Taylor Swift's "Love Story," was intended to be funny (or at least mildly amusing). Even if (especially if?) the comment was anonymous, that first internet betrayal still stings. As Sheryl Crow so wisely croons, "the first cut is the deepest."

However, holding myself to be the type of person that strives for justice above all else, I thought to myself, "Hey, Em. Let's get a little crazy up in here. What if this anonymous commentator was right. Why don't I step back and re-assess my role in the inundated drivel that is the world wide web? What would be the harm in fact-checking my lyrics analysis with a specific Act and Scene from Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet that was provided by the anonymous commenter, an Act and Scene which might reveal my wrongful interpretation of Taylor Swift's pop-country classic?"

And so, dear reader, I did just that. Thanks to the marvel of the modern age, SparkNotes can give all the literary answers that a girl with a blog could ever possibly need (or want). Now, instead of drawing upon my less-than-kodak memory from when I read that most notable of Shakespeare's plays way back in junior high, all can be explained to me in clear, concise, bullet-point form. Thanks, Sparknotes!

Before we get to the comment, let us first review that original offending post that triggered an anonymous single-entity backlash. In the analysis, the only resources used were the lyrics to the aforementioned pop song, "Love Story." At more than one point in my analysis, I implied that Taylor Swift's literary allusions were perhaps ever the slightest bit off the mark from the literary references' more commonly understood meaning. To save you, fellow reader, the time, here were my main points. (I am copying what I said in the original blog post, because a) I had it right the first time and b) I am lazy.)

Taylor Swift lyrics, Love Story:

And I said, "Romeo, take me somewhere we can be alone./ I'll be waiting, all that's left to do is run.
You be the prince, and I'll be the princess,/ It's a love story, baby, just say, 'yes'."

The commentary that was originally posted alongside the lyrics:


"If you follow Shakespeare's logic, unrealistic expectations will only end in double suicide. Take heed, young Taylor. Also important, princes and princesses are an entirely different metaphor from Romeo and Juliet. Most princes and princesses had arranged marriages that were intended to unite kingdoms and promote royal agendas. Yes, now there's a love story to base your life around."

Taylor Swift lyrics, Love Story:

'Cause you were Romeo, I was a scarlet letter,
And my daddy said, "Stay away from Juliet."/ But you were everything to me,
Begging you, "Please don't go". 

The commentary that appeared alongside the lyrics:

"I may not have been the happiest with the Romeo and Juliet metaphor, but those emotions feel like puppy love compared to how I feel about the Scarlett Letter reference. Starcrossed lovers- fine. Ok. You're a teenage girl. But has the girl, or any person in her family or friend circle, even her staff for that matter, ever read the Scarlett Letter?

Let's review: the Scarlett Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Protagonist Hester Prynne committed adultery and then carried the resulting child while being marred by an outcast reputation and trying to repent for her sins. Hawthorne sure enjoyed himself a good love story.

It's not just the fact that the whole Scarlett Letter thing was just a completely ill-used metaphor, it is the idea that it written explicitly to be an interchangeable allusion with the Romeo and Juliet and prince/princesses lyrics. My IQ, it rolls along the floor, slowly, away from me. "

Now, for your viewing pleasure, here is the anonymous comment in full.

"You are entirely wrong romeo and juliet would have had arranged marriages hence paris and capulets Act 3 Scene 5 outrage of Juliet not following this. shut up"

Let us, as scholars, attempt to dissect it. For the sake of argument, let's assume that the words "not following this" was intended to be a separate statement from the "arranged marriages" critique. Here, I am forced to dock one point from Anonymous Commenter (AC) for their complete disregard of conventional sentence structure and possessive forms. (Even if they did use the word "hence.") However, I cannot deny AC's point that Romeo and Juliet, though not princes and princesses as the Swift song hints, would have had arranged marriages. So one point awarded back to them. If you're following, AC has a total sum of love. (Deliberate double entendre tennis/"Love Story" pun. Carry on.)

Let us go to the action of Act 3 Scene 5 that AC references as the crux of both their argument and my wrongful interpretation. Here's 11 pages of Shakespeare condense into one riveting paragraph:

Romeo and Juliet wake up the day they got secretly married and after Romeo kills Juliet's cousin, Tybalt (even though she didn't know that. Marriage dealbreaker.) Juliet wants Romeo to stay. Then Romeo wants to stay, but Juliet wants him to go. Romeo leaves so the Capulets won't kill him. Juliet is sad. Juliet's mom comes in and breaks the news that her dad arranged a marriage between Juliet and Paris later that day. Juliet says no, they fight, and Juliet weeps a lot. The Nurse tells Juliet that Paris is better than Romeo. Juliet gets mad. She tells the Nurse that she's going to Friar Lawrence's to repent for her sins, but as we later find out (SPOILER ALERT) Juliet actually goes there to commit suicide because she thinks her life with Romeo is over. End scene.

Hm.

While I do agree that Juliet's dad asked her to stay away from Juliet, as Taylor Swift did sweetly sing about, I still fail to see the deeper connection to Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter. Forbidden love, perhaps? Still, the details of both relationships seems like apples and oranges to me. And how does it fit into the the prince and princesses allusion? The fact remains that just because they sound relatively romantic when you sing about them and your target audience doesn't really know what they mean, it doesn't mean the lyrics actually make sense. So if an anonymous commenter on some unknown blog argues that a certain lyrical analysis doesn't make sense, but offers an argument that in itself does not make sense, does that mean I win?

Of course it does! It's my blog. I hope we all learned something today, kids. I know I sure did.
And that lesson is that SparkNotes has amazing "study break articles" like PDA: When Is It Ok? and The Secret Crush Test. Screw Shakespeare and Swift, I'll be here for hours.

Stop, Look, Wave

Spotted: on a lonely pedestrian walkway, somewhere in a sleepy cattle-town of New England. A pedestrian crosswalk that states, "STOP LOOK WAVE."

This is a new development. I lived in this town for four years and yet, in all that time, one (eins, uno, one) person got hit by a car. The car at fault was, it should be noted, traveling at less than 10 miles per hour. The man that was hit was only slightly bumped, a little rattled, and mostly embarrassed. In the scope of vehicular accidents, this one may not have even registered. And yet, here we are given irrefutable proof that there was a committee who decided to assuage their deep concern for pedestrian safety in that one main street two-thousand person town through explicit written directions about how to cross a street. STOP LOOK WAVE.

I would like to point out, for the record, that if one were to follow these directions of "Stop Look Wave" exactly, then they would be putting themselves in a situation that has them staring directly at the ground and not, you know, oncoming traffic. Some people can't walk and chew gum, what if you can't walk and read words at the same time? Then what? This would be especially difficult to do if you're not expecting words to be there on the ground to read in the first place. And what if you're a slow reader? There you are, walking across a nice, bright, well-lit, seemingly safe pedestrian walkway when, hark! What are these strange new symbols affixed on the ground? Why I bet someone wants me to read them... BAM. Log-loader truck.

I would also like to point out, for the record, that these instructions don't actually tell a pedestrian what to do after one has properly stopped, looked, and waved. Now what? Clearly, if I've taken the time to read the words, I am simply trying to obey the letter of the law. If some city councilman is going to go as far as to tell me how to properly cross the street through explicit written directions, at least take the time to make them a complete set of directions. How long has mankind been crossing the street as a pedestrian? Since the invention of the automobile? Since the dawn of time? (Woolly mammoth crossings. Real threat.) I hate to be one advocating survival of the fittest here, but if at this point in the history of humanity you can't safely cross a street without something hitting you, then maybe you just shouldn't be passing on your genes. You know? It's not like there are directions dictating what to do about revolving doors, and people seem to manage those just fine on their own. Well, almost.

Guest Appearances by: the President & the Bieber

Some things in life you only really think over as you are idly drifting off to sleep one random Tuesday evening. They may be light daydreams or beautiful visions, ones that may never come to pass but, with enough hope and prayer, you feel that one day, maybe, in some distant universe, they just might.

Justin Bieber has never been in any such moments for me. Yet now, as I welcome him as the newest addition to my household, a feeling that is nothing short of glee comes over me when I pass him in my house. He's usually in the dining room or the kitchen and he hasn't seemed to move on his own accord yet, as cardboard cutouts tend to do. But sometimes we give him a little help around the house and place him in the upstairs bathroom, or the walk-in closet, or even Ryan's bedroom. The Biebs has proven to be entirely too effective at freaking out at at least one (if not both) of my housemates.

"Bieber in my bathroom! Bieber in my bathroom!" Ryan screamed last night when she went to brush her teeth and found Bieber instead. Justin didn't flinch, but I guess it is because he is so used to being near screaming and crying girls.

It's one thing to wake up in the middle of the night and see the unexpected silhouette of a person standing there motionless, but it's another thing entirely to flip on the lightswitch and be met with the uncomfortably sultry eyes of one underage Canadian pop sensation. It feels more than a little wrong. (But, in the words of Ryan, also a little right?) Recently, all the roommates (myself included) decided that the sight of one of the cutouts in someone's bathroom or closet late at night or first thing in the morning was probably not a great idea in terms of avoiding attacks. Even if the cutout's hair is perfectly coiffed.

The Biebs' recent Cambridge adoption gives some much needed company to our previously singular dining room loiterer: President Barack Obama.  For now, the Prez. and the Biebz spend working nights together staring off at walls across from each other. (On the weekends, we pimp them out for photo ops.)

To make things more festive, we've given the Biebs some mardis gras beads. (Did he take his top off in New Orleans? Would he? We may never know). We left Pres. Obama without any accoutrements. We might be young, but we're not disrespectful.

Even without the pranks, simply having the cutouts around is enjoyable.

"Morning, Biebs." I say to him as I grope my way around the kitchen for coffee. As he has yet to respond, I'm just going to assume that he's not a morning person. (Yet.)

"He's too tall!" Denise told me tonight as she stood on tiptoes trying to kiss the President. See? Super enjoyable.

But having them around has also raised a few questions. Does President Obama actually wear glasses? Is Justin Bieber's head really 60 percent larger than the president's? What are we going to do with the cutouts after the novelty wears off? ...Will the novelty ever wear off? Am I actually in bed with Justin Bieber? To all of the above, a hearty yes. (Except for the novelty question.)

Once Upon a Time I Had a Blog

Once upon a time, there was a girl. After college, this girl found herself "funemployed," which is really just an optimistic way of looking at life without a salary. With too many aspirations in her heart and not enough change in her pocket, she did what she thought to be logical next step: she moved to the the nearest metropolitan area. And then that was where she got stuck. "What now?" she asked herself as she poured over the Globe's scanty helpwanted page. "What now?"

Then she fretted. She fretted about not having enough money, about not pursuing a fulfilling career. She griped over not having enough free time, but mysteriously she did not know what she did the other hours of the day. Not a small amount of times was spent fretting over not having enough space on her DVR, though initially she had her doubts whether she actually needed it. She didn't, but she was now so heavily ensconced with the tv shows that she fervently watched during her funemployment period that she could never give it up now. She started a blog. She wrote often about the riveting minutiae of her everyday existence. And sometimes about macaroni.

Then, a year later, she found herself employed. She had a job that she looked forward to waking up in the morning for, she had career prospects that she could really get behind. She found herself surrounded by colleagues who shared not only similar hopes and dreams but pandora stations. Along with this introduction to a more "corporate" world came regular hours of operation and semi-regular paychecks, ones that that credited her not with "experience" or "character building opportunities" but good ol' legal American tender. She was content, more than she had been back in the dark ages with no job prospects and a lot of recorded television. And it was good.

But, she recognized, it was also bad. She could no longer watch hours of youtube a day; she no held the (self-proclaimed) title of being the "most culturally tuned in" among her peers. There were Tosh.0 references that she did not understand. She no longer had a shocking amount of free time with which to write down her super important thoughts regularly, as her adoring 13 fans have most definitely noticed and probably fretted over. (For that, she is truly sorry.)

But that girl, that idealistic empowered young girl, she made a promise to herself one fateful Wednesday night. She would still blog- oh yes: she would blog. She would blog the blog out of blogger, she told herself. But this girl was concerned- would the everyday minutiae of a more excel-spreadsheet driven world be less exciting to read than the world of the unpaid-intern-living-on-a-nickel-and-a-prayer? She did not know. But she would try- by god, she would try.

So let me tell you a little bit about me over the past few weeks. I journeyed by Uhaul van away from that big metropolitan city to a little village across a river. In this village, coffee shops abound and bike racks clutter store fronts. Bicycling is so common here that on the first day that my roommates and I moved in my landlord handed us a pamphlet on proper bicycling etiquette. The pamphlet was 8 pages long. And after playing the not-super-fun game of "dodge the biker" day after day, I am pretty confident that I am the only person in Cambridge to read up on proper bicycling procedure. (But am confused why they still have the pamphlet.) In my new home, there is a significant community focus here on "supporting local businesses" and buying from "eco-friendly stores," you know, the kind that purchase foods from pesticide-free local farms and sell vegan footwear. As a vegetarian, I am decently ok with these places of business. But even for me, I think it's pretty crunchy.

Speaking of crunchy, I work at a sustainability firm. Fun fact! In the course of one day, I get to say the word "sustainability" in all its various forms ("sustainable initiatives," "environmental efforts," "green [insert noun here]...") approximately a quintillion times. There aren't that many ways to say it. Trust me- I've tried. It's my job.

Because of working, I firmly suspect that I have started to develop carpal tunnel in my right pointer finger. I blame this weird and singular ailment on the poorly taught typing lessons that my (very public) middle school forced every student to take. I passed the typing class with flying colors, though I left the class being able to type with all of the fingers of my left hand but only the pointer finger on my right hand. (Yet, in spite of this handicap, I can still hit 84 words per minute on Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing. What now, Mavis.)

I now live in a real neighborhood with neighbors who not only know my name but stop and say hello. It's a change from the no-named floor-waxers in apartment 7 last year. I can look out my window and be met with not another brick building as before but the trees and the yard that belong to the French family next door. Their three little French children play outside in the street and shout cute little things at me that I don't understand. My only french phrases besides "hello" are "Je suis un ananas" ("I am a pineapple") and "Donne-moi tout vous croissants," ("Give me your croissants.") The first was taught to me by my (usually) trustworthy older sister, and the second was learned on the fly when traveling abroad and trying to obtain breakfast. (Emily Flynn: working to promote the negative international stereotype of Americans, one mangled croissant-demand at a time.) 

On my new morning commute, I have to walk through the Harvard campus. This commute is one of my favorite parts of the day because the people-watching options are endless: the frazzled freshman, clutching campus maps and asking strangers like me where specific lecture halls are; bikers dodging innocent pedestrians with their eco-friendly tote bags; stately-looking professors gliding across the yard in flowing skirts and tweed jackets. (You think I am kidding- I've seen three tweed jackets. Clearly not an unfounded stereotype there, Harvard.)

So while I don't get to play with jellyfish or octopi as often as I did once before, I hope that you will stay on with me on this wild journey through young adulthood. Because, for lack of a better reason, my mom still thinks that I am funny, and therefore you should too. And besides, I'll even tell you the story about how I had a near brush with death with a four-and-a-half foot long barracuda last week in the Gulf. But that's for another time.

The Night I Tried to Save a Mouse

This is the story of a baby mouse. A baby mouse, silver-furred and maybe three inches in length, went off in the search of food one day. He crawled underneath an old stove in an old apartment building in an old neighborhood of Boston. He inched forward, whiskers brushing bread crumbs and stray macaroni noodles that shared the space underneath the stove, and then he got stuck. Stuck on a strategically placed sticky pad. This sticky pad was installed against the tenant's will after a recent cockroach threat befell the building. But this baby mouse was not a cockroach, and as he tried to escape, he got more and more stuck. He squeaked his little squeak aloud for nobody. This baby mouse, too small to see how he fit into the bigger picture, couldn't contemplate his existence or wonder where he went wrong. Also, he was too far away to eat the fallen macaroni noodles. So, he continued to squeak his tiny baby mouse squeak. That is how I found him when I got home from work.

There are many aspects that I love about my new job: the people, the actual work itself, the fact that my commute has been cut in half. It's great. But perhaps the most novel and satisfying aspect is the flexibility to get home by dinnertime, a new tradition. Hours of free time now exist in the evenings, stretching before me every time I cross the threshold of my apartment after work. I could go to the gym! Or hang out with friends! Or spend hours getting caught up on television! I could even (gasp) go to bed early. (Which I almost never do! But I could!) All of which excites me. 9-5 never felt so good.

So today, when I got home, I did my ritual. I flipped open my computer to send some emails. I put on some music intending to de-stress (today's choice being sultry blues a lá Keb Mo'). I went on facebook, and then rummaged around the kitchen for a snack.

And then I heard a squeak.

More than just a squeak, it was a outright cry. It would start and stop, depending on my movements. I thought it was me. But then the squeaks would start again. I stopped. The squeaks stopped.

"Please don't be in the ritz crackers. I really wanted hummus with those." I muttered to the mice at large in my kitchen.

I swooped into action. I pulled on rain boots, rubber that is impenetrable to mice and other small critters. I grabbed a sizeable knife. I worked my way around my kitchen, opening cabinet doors slowly and holding my breath. The mice weren't in the ritz; I breathed a sigh of relief. I waited out the squeaks, using a type of eco-location not unlike that of a dolphin, to try to find the crying mouse. I finally found him: stuck and lying on one side, freaking out underneath my stove. I called my mom.

"Flush it down the toilet."
"MOM! I can't just flush it down the toilet." I exclaimed, shocked. "It's alive!" I was looking down at the baby mouse; it seemed so helpless, so stuck.
"Fine then. Put it in a garbage bag and leave it outside."
"And let it suffocate? It is a baby. Don't you understand?!"

She didn't. I was torn: I couldn't bring myself to kill the mouse, that much I knew for certain. So I took the baby mouse, sticky pad and all, to the street outside of my apartment. I sat down and placed the mouse gingerly on the ground. And then I attempted to extract it from what I can only assume was an industrial-strength sticky pad. I cursed exterminators everywhere. I looked up at the skies and cried, "Why?" I tried to offer the mouse words of encouragement.

"You have so much to live for!" The mouse stopped squirming, perhaps internalizing my words, and squeaked. It twitched its whiskers agonizingly. "Please stop making that sound, it is breaking my heart!" I said as I attempted to unstick its tail first.

There were other people on the street, too, on their way home from work or taking an evening stroll. A few stopped to talk to me.

One lady scrunched up her nose. "Oh my god, is that a... is that a mouse?!"
 "Uh, yeah." I told her as I worked.
"Why would you bring that out here?!"
"As opposed to... inside?"
She walked away, shaking her head.
"I'm saving a life here, what are you doing with your life today, lady?" I responded, mostly to the ants.

I gave a frustrating grunt to no one in particular, trying to ease a plastic knife soft side up gently underneath one of the mouse's hind legs. As Horton the Elephant taught us in Dr. Seuss's seminal, "Horton Hears a Who," "a person's a person, no matter how small." I didn't care that other people thought I was weird; I felt I was right. Personal conviction is all I've got going for me, lately.

Enter stage left my roommate's boyfriend, Eric. Eric was stopping by to pick up things for my roommate, as she was currently on vacation. At this point, my path and the roommate's would not cross for another 11 days due to a wacky series of overlapping vacations and weddings. Eric borrowed my keys to go upstairs and get more tools to help with the baby mouse extraction. He came back down with a paper towel, a cup of water, and a fork from a silverware collection that was given to my parents when they were first married. I thanked him for the fork, deciding that maybe using a nice fork to try to remove the mouse was not inappropriate, but actually karmically right. Nice things for all beings, no matter how small.

Eric stuck around for another ten minutes, offering encouragement in the form of calling me a crazy hippie and telling me that this was one of the craziest things he'd seen in a while.

"Then you need to get out more." I told him. He stayed a bit longer, but left to head back home, wishing me luck with the "mouse problem." Minutes passed.

And then I looked up. I didn't have my cell phone. I didn't have my wallet on me, nor my ID. Or my keys. What I did have was a baby mouse stuck to a sticky pad on the sidewalk outside of my apartment. And flip flops.

I sprinted to the subway faster than I ever thought was possible in flip flops. Looking back on the scene, I envision something like the ending of "The Graduate,": Dustin Hoffman pounding on the windows to get the attention of the girl he loves at her wedding. "Elaine!" he screams, pounding on the windows. "Elaaaaine!"

I was shouting: "ERRIIIC!" A man, who I can only assume is also named Eric, turned around. "Sorry, not you!" I screamed at him, scanning the tops of heads for a tall guy in a blue button down. Nothing. Eric was gone. And with him, my keys.

That walk home was the longest walk home of my life this far. I entered into a brief spiral of despair. I walked up my street to my mouse, still very much stuck. 'Please don't die on me', I willed it. 'Please don't; then all really is lost.'

I sat outside my apartment. Water started to drip down on me from three flights above, potted plants fresh from a recent watering. I don't move, and resign myself to wait for the next person to walk by to ask for help. A woman strolls past angrily on her cell phone, but I decide to try my luck anyway. "Excuse me!" I say to her, explaining my situation in one breath. She wishes me luck without stopping. I glare at her back. I entered into another brief spiral of despair. To pass the time.  No one walks by.

Twenty minutes later a man comes outside to smoke a cigarette. I appraise him from a distance: he seems decent enough. I approach him slowly, hands open in the universal symbol of "I'm a hapless female, please help me!" I learn his name is Matt. Matt listens understandingly, and then runs inside to grab his phone. He offers me a cigarette while I wait. And while this is a family blog, I have to tell you- I truly contemplated beginning smoking right then and there. If anytime is a good time to start smoking, it might have been then. And there. But ultimately I decide against it, because karma is already apparently against me. I don't need to give it definite reasons to keep me on its bad side.

Using my new friend Matt's phone, I call the first four people who came to mind that might have my roommate's number, cursing myself for not having committed her number to memory after years of friendship. Not one person picks up. "Some friends I have!" I attempt a laugh and walk away, thanking him.

But Matt tells me that he feels bad for leaving me without a solution, and offers to be with me to ring all the buzzers on my apartment. So we do. No one answers. "Some neighbors I have!" I only have one joke, and no plans to get out of my situation become apparent. I take a moment to have an abbreviated talk with God.

"So... this seems unfair. I tried to save one of your beloved creatures. And this is how you repay me? Creating a series of unfortunate events to lock me out of my apartment? I'll keep that in mind for the future."

Matt offers to stick with me until someone walks by again. I promise to bake him cookies, many many delicious cookies. Serendipitously, not long after a neighbor comes home. With his help, I call our landlord and arrange for him to come let me into my apartment as soon as he can, in "probably an hour and a half." I thank him profusely. I quietly feel guilty for cursing his name aloud more than once over the past year. I do not tell him about the mouse situation. 

I thank all my new friends, reassuring them that I will be just fine. I want them to leave so that I can continue setting free the baby mouse, which neither of them has noticed yet. It is probably for the best. Ten minutes later the mouse was free, and I still had an hour and twenty minutes to kill. No computer, no cell phone, no iPod. Just me. It felt more than a little unnatural.  And kind of liberating.

I sat on my stoop. It was a nice night, if one were not sitting underneath dripping plants. Having nothing better to do, I watched people pass by. I wondered if the girl in the polka-dotted dress knew how nervous she looked walking down the street. I wondered why she might be that nervous. Maybe she got locked out of her apartment, too. I wondered why the big man with the surly demeanor was carrying a feminine-looking purse. Perhaps it's his wife's? Maybe he's just really that comfortable with himself. Now that I'm done with removing a baby mouse from a sticky pad, few people glance my way. A biker happens to look in my direction and then almost gets sideswiped by a car. At this point I've given up on stoop-sitting, having decided that since my karma is apparently already rough, I should probably move on before I take out a biker or kill someone. I walked to the local library; it was closed. I walked around my neighborhood. I was bored. The Starbucks at the corner of my street was still beautifully open and mostly empty, so I headed there.

Trying to avoid the appearance of loitering, I asked the guy behind the counter if it would be alright for me to hang around for the next hour or so. "I got locked out of my apartment." I repeated, for what feels like the hundredth time. I apologized for not being able to buy anything. He tells me it's no problem, make myself comfortable.

I sat down at a table and the minutes proceeded to inch along. I literally twiddled my thumbs, just to see what it feels like. Does anyone actually twiddle their thumbs when they have nothing better to do?  I did.  It didn't seem to make the time pass by quicker.

"Here." The man behind the counter appeared behind me, handing me a New York Times. "How about a coffee on the house? Sounds like you had a rough day."

Because Joshua from Starbucks was kind enough to make me a cafe au lait, I tell him about the baby mouse. I'm not sure this was equal compensation, but he laughs all the same. He said he would have done the same thing. For having been so lost in the world not an hour ago, I found myself sitting in a coffee shop, making a new friend, reading the newspaper, and sipping at a coffee while soft jazz played in the background. "Ok," I admitted to myself. "So this night was not all terrible."

All at once, my landlord arrives, Eric arrives again with my keys, and I am back reunited with my cellphone in my now mouse-free apartment. And, with the exception of my mother's wedding fork, everyone and everything ended up free, safe, and happy. And well-caffeinated. All is well that ends well.