Giddy Giddy Ghosts

 At Disneyland a few weeks ago I saw a display of Mickeys and felt a nostalgic breeze. Something I'd known before I knew most things. Stacked stuffed Mickeys. I've known the stacked stuffed Mickeys three decades, can you/I believe? I had a VHS of a singalong video, Disney songs over short almost music videos of the park. Genius idea. Basically a thirty-minute commercial I rewatched again and again.

Two nights ago I couldn't sleep. I found the "tape" on YouTube. Just as I remembered and yet I didn't remember most. I think I fast forwarded big chunks, in hindsight. Yes, I think I did. I liked the Mainstreet song and Goofy sweeping and then there's a bunch of Adventureland bits that bothered me. "Follow the Leader" and Tom Sawyer's island. I scrubbed through the video just as I did on the brown beanbag in the Midwestern summer and then ah ah yes. Finally, the best part, the "Giddy Giddy Ghosts" segment. Captain Hook and a terrifying fox creeping around the Haunted Mansion. Yes, yes, yes. I felt my pupils dilate all the same. Mm the horror, mm the spooks.

I did something I assuredly never did as a child: watched all the credits. Who made this funny little project? The names came up so 1990 colorful and tilted. I wondered if there had been a discussion about if randomly shoving in a horror piece was really appropriate for the rest of the mood. Or did no one care what was going on in those stupid little side projects when The Lion King was in pre-production? "This will scare kids," I imagine someone saying, having no idea it would be my favorite part for ever and ever.

Alice in Ship Land: The Ten-Day Cruise

During the NOLA Cemetery tour, I saw the voodoo queen’s tomb and the future burial place of Nic Cage. I also accomplished Bucket List Item See The Street the Streetcar Used to Ride Down Named Desire. I had to take a cab because it was a 45 minute walk to that part of town. No matter. Once I stood on the street Blanche had before me, I Yelped “pastry” like one does and walked around to various shops before I found something delightful: ginger fennel apple spinach pressed juice, blueberry pistachio pancakes, and a bowl of yogurt. It was a major hotspot with a million mustaches and that vaguely dirty vibe. When I looked at the receipt my eyes bugged out. Stinkin hipster brunch for one cost $21! Ah well, that’s part of the experience.

 New Port! I was overwhelmed with the possibilities of what do with my one golden day on Grand Cayman, and I chose right. ZPill, MB, and I went to a turtle sanctuary. The excursion was actually called “Turtles, Turtles, and More Turtles.” It was one of the best days of this whole dang enchilada. I saw giant 600-lb sea turtles, held baby turtles, snorkeled in a freshwater pond where a turtle swam right up to my face, fed a bunch of finches, and went down a slide that led to waterfall pool. I MEAN!? The day was over too soon. I forked some samples of rum cakes from a hut en route back to the ship so I could get ready for work. Major snaps for May 11, 2016—I made friends with a teeny turt in the morning and performed for two-thousand people at night. I ate double chocolate chip cookies in the middle.

 Guatemala is not an actual tourist port like all the other cities we go to. The gangway was in a literal train car graveyard. One concrete building a stone’s throw away full of card tables of trashy souvenirs. That was it. Our cast stuck together and exited the barbed wire fence area. Men with machine guns stood nearby. We asked for a cab to the nearest town to get lunch. Were we about to be mugged? Unclear. The car ride was hot and sad. The quality of life was low. But the cab driver came through! He dropped us off at a little seafood restaurant on the water. We ordered and took a stroll down the dock. I drank the best limeade I’ve ever had followed with a slice of pie and a coconut fritter from a guy walkin’ around with a tray of candied fruits.

Guat treatz.

I invited everyone over for Friday the 13^th festivities. Tail even wrote in our weekly calendar “Alice’s Birthday (Observed).”  We crammed into my cabin and each told a story—some made up, some true, some ghostly, others chilling. ZPill was the first to leave, but we sat around sharing creepy tales and munching Walgreens brand caramels for a while longer. I got up to brush my teeth in my teeny bathroom and ZPill popped out of the shower! I shrieked my face off and crumpled to the ground. As someone who loves to be scared, I could not have asked for a better present. Besides maybe the stuffed turtle MB gave me.

Early in the week, I finished a seventh draft of my screenplay, wrote some emails, read some friends’ scripts. By Thursday I was officially unable to be productive anymore. On Saturday instead of going to Belize I had breakfast at 11:30 and then napped all afternoon. I got up just in time for improv rehearsal and then ZPill and I, both not quite ready to go home, wandered around the ship. The arcade was empty, so we played air hockey. We discussed theatre on the helipad. I ate the only things that seemed edible (pizza and a ton of Pringles) and threw up.

I might miss Costa Maya most of all. I did all the things as a farewell tour. Swam in the ocean, took a beach walk, got a massage from a lil abuella, laid in the sun at Nacional Beach Club, and got henna tatts with MB. And still, I forgot to drink from a final coconut. It’s always something, isn’t it?

In our scriptless show, during Pillars MB played my gay aunt Karen who took me to an amusement park to tell me my parents were getting a divorce. Every time I got sad, she fed me candy. It was too real, and that’s some of the fun of improv—your real life friendship is up on stage, and the audience has no clue. We watched the juggler on board this week with some other crew pals. I am surprised by how many friends I have made here. It just happens like any other community in the world. See each other regularly enough, start saying “hi” in hallways--next thing you know you’re jumping into the ocean together and he’s telling you what growing up in Serbia is like.

Speaking of crew “friends,” this boat is thirsty. We’re headed into a dry dock period and everyone knows it. Guys who have been cordial in elevators are suddenly sniffing around like mad for something to appease their month alone in an empty port with very few women. “Wait, let’s make sure we hang out this week!” they say with not-so-hidden desperation. “How will I find you later?” A deckboy professed his affection for me and swore he’d never love again if I meant what I said when I told him, “I have a boyfriend.” Poor knuckleheads.

Final port felt surreal. Goodbye, Caribbean. I may never see you again. I started the day with a ridiculous journey to find a Mexican candy flavored McFlurry. I get it, I’m TRASH. I walked a mile and a half in the blistering sun getting a real blister from my flip flops. When I arrived I was told the ice cream machine wasn’t working. I walked back to the usual crew beach bar, promptly ordered an ice-cold smoothie, and sunk to the bottom of the pool, letting my hair fall out of it’s elastic band and float like algae.

I did my usual jump off a high wall into the ocean. About twenty feet. There’s a way to crawl up a narrow corner of the rock and jump from a thirty-foot spot, but it’s significantly scarier. Barely space to stand up. And Oh. So. High. I have started the crawl three times before. I usually get about two feet before I imagine slipping and decapitating myself on the brick. Then I abort the mission. “It’s okay not to do everything,” I think. I tell Folds this, who has done the big jump once and wants to again but says he won’t because his back has been bugging him. We have a great day. I splash, I do handstands, I finally get an amaretto ice cream cone from the mother/son shoppe down the way. Half an hour before we need to get back on the ship Folds marches over to me and points at me, then at the big wall. “We’re doing it.” And he’s so certain, I follow. I watch him crawl and jump. I follow and stop. I’m terrified. But a gal and two guys are below swimming. They cheer me on. A dude with red dreadlocks (of course) comes up behind me and gives me tips about focusing on my center of gravity. “You can do it,” this stranger I might be tempted to razz in another context says, and it really helps. “I’m scared,” I keep repeating. It is empowering to announce it. It’s rare we get to announce our fear. I do over and over, but then, I slowly stand, and I scream, and I fly. I can barely tell where one blue ends and one begins. Moments later Dreadlocks does a backflip, of course.

Saturday is a long day of signing papers and packing and trying to eat through the snacks I didn’t finish (lunch of buffalo wing Pringles, Mexican shortbread cookies, and a diet 7UP not recommended). After our final show, the entire entertainment department all had a toast in the theatre. It felt truly warm. Goodbye dancers, goodbye singers, goodbye aerialists. In these moments I think how differently I would feel if I had a Facebook. But I don’t need to know what the saucy Brit I befriended will be doing next year. I will only remember him as he was, in high tweed pants, drinking champagne from a plastic cup on the lip of the stage. ZPill asked if I had snacks, and when I told him the only option he decided he was not above the Cadberry egg I had already thrown in the trash. They’re covered in foil, ya know?

Debark was the longest morning of waiting in lines, lugging suitcases, and showing forms. But joy filled the air. Everyone fireworking out back into their lives. ZPill and I went to Frenchman Street and debriefed. We asked the cab driver to drive by a donut shop on our way out of town.

NOLA in the afterglow. Goodbye for now.

Alice in Shipland: Just Around the Riverbend

 Only one more cruise separates me from a stint on land, and oh, do we all feel it.

As I alluded to last post, at the end of last week I was riddled with anxiety about my future. Sunday morning the forecast was rain so I couldn’t even do my weekly early morning walk around the deck. I felt like a pony the stable boy had forgotten to let out. At 9 AM I practically exploded off the ship, rain jacket and baseball cap packed in my knapsack. Since I didn’t have much internet to do it was time to get some bucket list items taken care of. I sat by myself in Café Du Monde and felt immediately better listening to street corner jazz and inhaling puffs of powdered sugar. After finishing my café au lait I trotted down to the French Open Market where I spied all the knick knacks and bought myself a void-filling souvenir t-shirt. Peace filled by body toes up. Grey clouds camped above The Big Easy, but I was smiling. I bought the essentials at Walgreens. I smacked on a free sample of candied praline. And then, I went to a mystic shop that’s been in business since 1912 to get my tea leaves read.

My medium said some things—at times eerie and other times improbable, but the experience of sloshing the tea, sitting in the curtained creepy room, and holy cow, hearing thunder boom while a woman with frizzy hair and purple eyeliner said certainly what lay ahead? A priceless NOLA experience. I bustled along singing like Don Lockwood through voodoo doll gift shops and cobblestone. Right before embark I got a kale smoothie and some buttermilk drops to consume in my little dungeon. This would be a good week I decided. ZPill asked me later if he thought the physic could actually tell my fortune, and I said I don’t think so. I think she can just read pieces of what’s already inside me. How exciting that there is a universe in there. And I am not at the will of much besides what I choose.

Instead of my typical Cozumel day I took a ferry to Playa del Carmen—a ritzier Mexican tourist town. It was very clean and pretty and crystalline. I avoided everyone and listened to the playlist I made for the improv tournament my team traveled to in 2012. ZPill and I found a fancy as heck breakfast spot in a plaza. Donuts on pretty plates and tiny colanders of yogurt. Dudes at stands usually call out to those of us who are obvious tourists (white people) and usually I ignore them, but this particular guy was pointing at pictures of caves. And Adventure Alice was awakened. Next thing I know I’m alone in a cab headed to underwater caves.

They were incredible and all of my castmates who didn’t go because they thought $50 was much too much are idiots. When my little pod of eight people came to the first entrance I didn’t even see that we were about to step into water. Because the water was so glasslike it looked like it didn’t even exist. Oh but we did step in. In lifejackets we floated around the cavern. I spent most of my time shining my flashlight up to see the hoards of bats all snuggling with each other then periodically getting annoyed with my beam and fluttering about.

It was such a once in a lifetime experience to swim down a cool ancient pool and peer into an abyss of stalagmites. Sometimes we had to swim in very narrow little passages and our guide once asked us to sit perfectly still and turn off all our lights. It was the darkest dark. My favorite part was when our guide called us into a creepy crevice one at a time, had us put on our masks, and then he pushed our shoulders underwater so we could see the endless trail of underground cave. What was air and what was I swimming in and what was forming above? It was so hard to tell. The very last thing I did was take off my life jacket and swan dive into the deepest hole of the murky pool. Just another day at work!

I crossed West End off my Honduras bucket list. I got lost on my way to the beach and had to settle not to snorkel with friends but instead to journal alone with a frozen lemonade. I drank it out of pure desperation from wandering around in a near-hallucinatory heat state. Not all was lost. I found a sour cream chocolate donut. The chocolate was made in-house. I’m not mad. Things I am kind of over: laying too long in the sun, people having drunken conversations with me, not having the ability to text. Also, MB got 110 bug bites on the beach I was supposed to, so sometimes it ain’t bad to never arrive.

One thing I noticed this week is Twitter is too overwhelming for me. I barely look at it because I use precious online minutes to email pretty exclusively. Occasionally in a café with endless Internet powers I Instagram. But Twitter is so much so quickly. After twenty seconds of scrolling my brain is on fire. My attention span has increased significantly. I stand on the deck, facing forward with lips locked for forty minutes of crew drill. I get writer’s block on a deck chair, close my notebook, and have no other option but to watch waves. No commercials in pirated TV, no advertisements in my “commute.”

Three comedians is a treacherous number. Three creates an audience or a team, and it’s becoming something I actively avoid. In real life I can hack most anything because eventually I go home. But this is home. Person A jokes, Person B is annoyed, but Person C laughs. A and C never drop it. I have played all three parts and none are fun.

Instead of going to Belize I parked in the atrium next to the bar that also serves, like, four espresso drinks. This is the closest thing to having a café workday on the boat. I poked at my screenplays. I watched Thelma and Louise and was inspired to break some rules. So, my new thing is getting a plate of cheese cubes at lunch, shoving them in a mug, stuffing the mug in my backpack, and smuggling the cheese back to my mini fridge. Real outlaw.

During the 9 PM sketch show my brain exploded. I started a whisper as the show started and realized my mic was live and very hot. The top of our act began with a weird hiss. “Oh man, don’t screw up again,” I thought and twenty minutes later I missed a chair set. I just forget where we were in the running order and froze. “Okay, for real no more screw ups!” I lectured my own brain. And then at the top of a scene I said the flat wrong line. Everyone went off auto-pilot and navigated back to the meaning of the scene like tiny robots. It’s a bummer to finish a show for hundreds of clapping people, rip off your mic, and say, “I’m sorry everyone.” I went to the gym to run. I started thinking about my mistakes and realized they weren’t that bad. They only seemed bad because we’re all usually so polished. I do think I have entered a new phase of comedy since being here: the crisp professional, which does mean I will be harder on myself sometimes, but it also means I am doing better work.

Saturday night I like to have a lasagna roll at one of the sit-down restaurants before the “adult” improv show. It’s become a tradition. Entertainers are allowed to be seated between 8:30 and 9 PM. ZPill, MB, Folds, and I got flossy and arrived at 8:35. We were turned away. We walked to the opposite side of the ship and were told we should try the other place. Dejectedly, we went up to the buffet. A meat bonanza night. Ribs and pork chops and potatoes with bacon. I ate a lot of wilted lettuce smothered with balsamic and felt sorry for myself. EVEN THOUGH I still didn’t have to prepare or pay for my meal, I would have gladly done either to avoid the World’s Saddest Salad. But the four of us ate our grody little dinners in full performance attire while making jokes and truly enjoying each other’s company. Although it’s not possible to completely avoid annoyance with one another sometimes, we are a family.

My favorite part of the week is standing on the deck post-final show. The cool air refreshes me and the land in the distance tells me we’re close to port. Cell service. Freedom. Louisiana culture. We were in early this week, so my texts were sending around 11 PM. I was excited and promptly answered the bevy of SMS that flooded my phone. A dude with a mullet complimented me on the show and lingered a bit too long. I nicely ended the conversation and returned to The Internet. Ten minutes later he was back getting my drink order. No thanks, I said, and he sheepishly left. I hoped he didn’t feel too bad. But then he came back in ten minutes to ask if I wanted water. Nope. Ten minutes later he said I was stalking him. At this point I wanted to leave the public areas, but my phone would only work on the deck. Ten minutes later he said I shouldn’t be wearing my performance clothes if I don’t want people to notice me. Did I want to change in his room? I moved locations. He found me. He said we should do private improv for half an hour. I said no. He said he would bring Viagra. I told him firmly to leave me alone. He did.

But now I realized I was nearby a very interesting gang. The word “ghost” kept creeping in the air, so I asked, “Is this some kind of ghost conference?” Yeah, it actually was. 200 paranormal experts were onboard this week. I wish I had learned sooner! I asked a few questions. The clearly most famousy-like guy told a story about eating at a haunted diner that could never be found again and I was immediately grossed out by his ego. I honed in on a kind gal with blue hair who was happy to answer my questions and talk about her time as a spiritual investigator. MULLET GUY HAD THE NERVE TO CUT THROUGH A FLOCK OF PEOPLE TO TELL THEM WE WERE CLOSE AND WE’D BE LEAVING NOW. I publically told him I was uninterested in talking at all and the ladies gave him some Ew looks, so he slunk away. Blue hair and I exchanged info, but not before Mullet came back with his business card. I wanted to tear it up and throw it in the ocean, but I put it in my pocket because 1. Can’t litter in the ocean. 2. He’s still a passenger and I’m still an employee, and I can’t be rude to him despite his outright harassment. I’m just tired of being a woman for the moment.

Uncle Passing

Stay near, stay dear.

Ballons from Muffy, my final day of vacation.

I am starting to sense your location.
You are somewhere in the basement
beating on a makeshift drum kit
songs that I can hardly stomach.
I'm floating up the stairwell
with my fingers shaking frantic
thinking softly what a concrete mess we live in,
And what a icebox heart I've been given.

Charleston

Dad texted me, "You had anscestors who were on Folly Island during the Civil War." I texted back with a rare three exclamation point response: "We're staying at Folly Beach!!!"

DAD: History repeats itself.
ME: I'm mainly eating brunches.

Cocoa & s'more cake.

Biscuit & grits.

South Carolina is an old place that neither Bisque or I had never been to. It's funny when you travel alone with someone. You sort of are on an island--real or fake, historic or not. You make jokes at the start of the trip about the street sign "Courtenay" and repeat it over and over like a Forrest Gump "Jen-nay!" until it's funny, and it always is, every time. There's a little anthropology needed to unpack the vacation conversations. It all bleeds together. There's no one else.

Angel Oak: biggest oak in da world.

We slipped in an out of Southern accents. We saw Fort Sumter because I am my father's daughter and it didn't seem right to skip it. We looked at canons for half an hour and spent the remainder of the time waiting for the boat on a grassy patch under the confederate flag. I took out the Ziploc of snickerdoodles from Hill. A deer had smelled it in my purse the day before and followed me around the plantation petting zoo. I spent an extra minute admiring the pigs. They deserve life like people deserve life. The slave quarters were white and small. We saw from the nature tram.

Slaves lived here.

Meanwhile, we took happy caramel bites where the war began. "Six hundred thousand people died for this," Bisque said as he chomped again. It was a sunny day.

We had seen it rise. Because I had been up since three anyway. Donned those fleeces and stood with our iPhones bitter and quiet waiting for the star to peek over the water.

Our final afternoon we finally kicked off our shoes to make contact with the ocean. This is Bisque's very first time touching the Atlantic. We stood at the shoreline patiently waiting for the tide.

The mome.

Famous graveyard.

It was both charming and creepy to walk on cobblestones downtown. We started the trip with a ghost tour, so that sets a mood of sorts. We kept passing the Starbucks that was once a gallows. That type of thing. One day it ends. But it doesn't. Roots roots roots.

Ghoul's Night

(LIGHTS UP on FIVE GIRLS--RO, SHELLS, ALICE, KALE, AND PAKE in a CAR, en route to an abandoned motel in Phoenix.)

RO: You guys, I'm looking up skin walkers right now on Wikipedia.
SHELLS: How is that scary?
ALICE: ...because Wikipedia is hAuNtEd! OoOoO!
PAKE: Wicked-pedia.
       (KALE laughs.)
RO: Well, that wasn't scary. I'm redoing my Google search.
ALICE:...You mean...hAuNtEd Google? (Beat.) Boo-gle!
       (KALE laugh.)
RO: ...Is Ya-ghoul good? I can't tell.
SHELLS: No.
ALICE: Hey, guys, what's a ghost's favorite board game?
        (Beat.)
PAKE: Scattergories?
KALE: Boo-gle? As in Boggle?
ALICE: (Bitter someone got her Boggle joke.) Ouija Board, idiots!
PAKE: I dunno. I thought mine was pretty good.
ALICE: What's haunted about Scattergories?
PAKE: I dunno! It's just a fun-ass game!

(GIRLS drive off into the distance. FADE TO BLACK.)

Summer: The Ghost

So many things happen so fast.

Kath & Me in our little wooded home and office. June 2012.

There was this book I read and loved--
the story of a ship,
who sailed around the world and found
that nothing else exists
beyond its own two sails
and wooden shell 
and what is held within.
All else is sure to pass.
We clutch and grasp
and debate what's truly permanent,
but when the wind starts to shift
there's no argument.

I sing and drink and sleep on floors
and try hard not to be annoyed
by all these people worrying about me,
so when I'm suffering through some awful drive
you occasionally cross my mind.
It's my hidden hope that you are still among them.
Well, are you?

Don't Be Like That

Saturday night I saw one of my improv teacher's sketch shows. It was a revue, and it was alright. Sketch is hit or miss--it's always valuable to see as a writer. It was a pretty talented group. My teacher has been performing and improvising in Chicago for over a decade with lots of creds at all the main comedy venues. Her castmates were the same. One guy I've seen perform a a few times around town. He's good, but he was more than lackluster Saturday.

"Don't be like that," I silently thought from my tiny cabaret seat. "This is a small room of people, but don't you see? You can really make them happy right now. You can really create an environment for them to learn and grow. Don't be like that." But he was like that--a little slow, a little tired, phoning it in just a little bit.

And it's easy for me to say sitting comfortably with no lights on my face. It's easy for me to say. I know that. I know that because I had food poisoning in class the other day, and I dreaded being onstage. I was like that, no matter how much my teacher might have been quietly thinking, "Don't be."

"Night Hawks" at The Art Institute

And I passed a woman in a wheelchair on the corner of Sedgewick and North last night, and I shuffled along in my flip flops, slumped over, and she might have been thinking, "Don' be like that." And I didn't go out to the bars with my classmates after the show Saturday, and the nearby high schooler was overhearing the conversation thinking, "Don't." And the ghosts hover over us when we sit staring into space on the bus ride home, and they wish they could feel a striped seat beneath them, and really see the blackblue of the Chicago river at night.

The Way Afternoons Should Be

I slept in, and it still took all my strength to go on a run. I wanted to run, but I also was just in love with my comforter today. I started House of Leaves, which sucked me in. I was the guts of a Pillsbury crescent roll, lazy, but not lazy. But, the sun peeked out of the cool desert sky, so I laced up and ran. I listened to the entirety of The Good Life's "Album of the Year" as I passed green-garbed folk, happily milling on Mill. My muscles relaxed. I came home and took a cold shower. Lunch at the sun-spotted kitchen table--the remains of a loaf of Irish soda bread. The raisins to sweet, the dough so thick. In my navy heart tank, I bundle back up into my sheets. Read more about a haunted house through courier type. I could. I could.

Wet hair on my pink pillow, a good book in hand. Nowhere to be. No impending deadlines.

It's Spring Break, yatches.

Spring was poppin’ daises up ‘round rusted trucks and busted lawn chairs.

Haunted Dawn

Last weekend, Lazz and I headed out to middle-of-nowhere Missouri to participate in a guided tour and exploration of an official paranormal site. We visited a haunted building--formerly hotel, schoolhouse, brothel--now run down that was on Travel Channel's "Top Twenty-Five Most Haunted Places in the US."



It was a truly enjoyable experience--meeting these other couples from the petite college cheerleader and her brawny man who had "ghost apps" on their phones to the women who worked at a Reebok store together and watch ghost TV on weekends. We had experienced paranormal hunters with us. There was equipment for monitoring electro-magnetic charges, unexplainable flashes of light. I got seriously creeped several times, but I also laughed a lot with Lazz.

We stopped hunting around 3:30 AM. Too tired to drive back, Lazz and I set down blankets on the porch.


We were inside a closet that had a confederate flag on it. The house was once a stop on the underground railroad. We sand "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot" trying to invoke a spirit. It did not work.

The fireflies were huge, jetting between the ancient trees in the front lawn in front of us. Thousands of visible stars. Broken limestone was everywhere. The house creaked. Cicadas.

Suddenly the stars were disappearing. "Look what we did," I said. "We made the stars go away!"
"I think it's the light," he replied.
I pointed to one street light a mile away. "That?" I asked.
He laughed, "No. The big light. The sun."
"Oh that," I said. And next thing I knew, dew was everywhere and the sky was full of bright blue.

The sky became pink.
And then guess what happened?
Well, what do you think.

Bloody Mary

Tonight Big Taco was here. He is en route to a new life in a new city. He has been promising me a ghost story for almost a year, so tonight he came over. It was good to see him--this guy who used to b a good friend. College is funny like that. One quarter you eat dinner every day together, and then you see each other a couple times a month in passing, and then one of you leaves, and then you may never have a traditional spooky story telling night again.

Tonight Big Taco came over to tell me about eerie things that happened to him while he was living in Alaska last year. As to not bother Wiz who does not like scary things, we decided to go into the bathroom and turn off the lights. We were in there no longer than twenty seconds before he said, "I don't like bathrooms without the lights on because of Bloody Mary--" and before he had even finished speaking I had bolted out into the light, banging my knee in the process, and he was right behind me. Exploding from the tile and rustling shower curtain. We howled with laugher, amazed we could be so scared in under a minute. Roommates Wyn and LC heard and came out. What? What's this? We explained and they grinned--also fans of the macabre.

We sat in a circle on the floor of LC's bedroom and scared ourselves silly. I just realized something about myself: I'm really happy when I am scared. I always knew I liked scary stuff, but I am actually really happy when I expose myself to scary stuff. Internally, I checked in as my heart was stomping. I was frightened and happy.

I died so I could haunt you.

Soft

Small--the list of things I wanted to do in London my first time there, August 2006. We arrived and battled the time change with an immediate tour. Big Ben--the first item to be crossed off. Vince and I smiled our best under the drowsiness. Later, I tried to convince him to Tate with me. but he could only sleep. At night, passed out, I dreamt a man was in my room touching my body. I woke up to a puddle of chocolate. A Cadbary bar Vince had slipped under my pillow.

Today I reached the top of a roller-coaster and sighed soundlessly. I looked into eyes and read the last 200 pages of Beloved. My mind raced with baby ghosts and I rehearsed the best I could with Huntie even though my body was bubbling and tying itself into heavy ropes.

And you will take the heavy stuff, and you will drive the car, and I will look out the window and make jokes about the way things are.

Ghosts!

So far, there have been three super-natural experiences in my life. Pretty sweet, right? Yesterday, as I was boppin' around the internet looking for tickets for ghost haunting showsies, I go so engrossed I literally wanted to take on ghost-stuffs as a career. Let's talk about my experiences:

In high school I went with three other friends driving around cemeteries with white noise on the radio. We'd drive to a gravestone, ask a question, and then if the static jumped we'd get an answer. It was all well and fun until we found a convent cemetery. There were there elaborate high metal gates--as soon as we passed through the radio started BLARING gospel music. We reversed immediately and drove off in screams. After calming down, we went back and stopped right at the gate. We had not touched the radio. We found no stations playing gospel music. Not only around our white noise station, but at all.

While I was in Japan, a chunk of the group watched a horror film called The Orphanage one night. Afterwards we sat around telling ghost stories in the little tatami room. I told everyone how I am weirdly very interested in ghosts and hoped to see one one day. I got back to my room a little shaken. Nothing happened. The next day I was feeling bothered by something, so I go out a spiritual textbook to find inspiration. I opened it to a random page and stuck my finger down. It landed on a sentence that read "Ghosts are not real".

That winter while I was staying at my dad's apartment I spent most of my days doing the same stuff: scrapbooking, going o the gym, writing, watching movies. I was alone a lot while dad was at work--camped out on a futon usually. Well, one day I thought I heard someone at the front door knocking. I was watching a movie. I tensed up for some reason. It stopped and no one was there. Out of the corner of my eye I thought I saw the door open. I looked and it hadn't. I turned my head to the side and then back to the door where the door was open and a young man in running shorts was standing there. I panicked, blinked, and he was gone. The door was closed. I know that sounds non-sensical. All I can tell you is what I saw.