I am so glad to be back from Iowa I could pee on the floor!

(Sorry, that was inspired by Prathna Lor, and also by Kathy's excitement about pee in literature.)

I just spent way too many days in Iowa, and discovered that it wasn't ME all those years--Iowa makes me suck. My symptoms include: short temperedness, dark circles, feelings of aortal explosion, intense awareness of arm flab, saying "that's GREAT!" in a high-pitched voice about everything that is really not great, the desire to flee any and all things remotely related to marriage, and general self-hatred alternating with extreme narcissism. While there, I also experienced NPR withdrawal and overblown cravings for Jolly Ranchers--a lethal combination. Now that I am home, I feel smarter, but all my symptoms still linger, making my usual existence impossible, and especially difficult for my boyfriend, who has offered to murder Iowa for me. Our meeting on Friday will restore me to normal. I am praying for it, just as the Iowans do.

See that picture? My home town under weird, looming clouds? That is how I feel in Iowa.

Water, Shoes, Shoehorns, Iowa: Meaningless Tangentials

So I am trying to drink more water lately. I feel like my insides are full of gunk and that they need to be rinsed or watered down or whatever. It is so difficult for me to drink water, except in the form of coffee. I can drink coffee-water all day, but I have had the same glass of water sitting on my desk all morning and I've barely made a dent in it. The only time I can force myself to drink water is in the middle of the night. I don't know why this is, but it's a super bad idea because then I have to get up and pee a hundred times.

Usually I just go to the closet and pee on my boyfriend's shoes. He has way nicer shoes than I do, and gets upset when he is out in public and people accidently step on or scuff them. He also puts the tissue paper stuffing that comes in the toes back in the toes of the shoes when he is not wearing them. And he has a shoe rack in our closet, which I think is super weird. It seems like something my dad would do.

My dad, I remember, had shoe horns, and also this weird shoe-stretcher apparatus...I don't understand what either of them did for the shoes. Maybe he bought too-small shoes and had to stretch them out? The shoehorn I am clueless about. He also had a ridiculous amount of shoe polish, even a white canister for white sneakers, which is so weird. He was always making me buy suede-protectant for my shoes, which never worked and when my shoes got splotchy he would get angry because I hadn't keep up on the applications. The shoe polish was in this ugly wardrobe that later became the illicit substances drawer when Lala and I lived together in Iowa City. My Dad's shoe polish was next to his underwear (tightie whities), next to which was the top half of a Trivial Pursuit box with a bunch of pennies and cruddy rolls of BreathSavers and--I know you want to know this--a lone condom that was there for years and is probably still there.

Will water help me? Will water save my gunky insides? How can I drink more of it? What are shoehorns and shoe-stretchers for? Please oh please let me know.

Of caves and chardonnay

Abby and I went to Maquoketa Caves in eastern Iowa this weekend where I discovered that I don't like crawling on my belly into the unknown. Getting muddy, though: That's cool.

What's not cool? Being a vegetarian in the land of hog slaughter. Consistently, the only viable menu option was spinach 'n' artichoke dip. Saturday night, at the fanciest joint in Bellevue, we paid forty bucks for a slimy pile of iceberg lettuce, the aforementioned dip and a bottle of Yellow Tail. We could have recreated this meal for approximately ten bucks, wine included.

Also we stayed in this half-awesome, half-terrifying old hotel room above a saloon, where the mattress dipped toward center and the pillows smelled like old people. It had a magical mirror that gave chiseled abs to our reflections. I tried to take a picture of it, and the camera shut itself off.

Often, I yearn for Iowa. I want a farmhouse in the middle of nowhere, or maybe a series of small cabins where all of my favorite people live and do creative things. I want to be alone(ish) and outside.

Should I end this post with an extended spelunking-as-metaphor-for-life passage? Naw.