From the drafts folder

A man at the Teepee is good at pool.  We watch him win against someone who's almost as good.  No balls left on the table after the game - that's how you know it's an even match.  To do a thing of no consequence well - to perfect a skill - like someone who cooks perfect eggs, someone who parallel parks in one fluid motion - to learn to do something well for the pleasure of doing it.

We watch him win and at the start of the next match he says,"Good luck."  He has long hair and an old black t-shirt on.  Someone snickers when he says good luck - and suddenly his saying it is conceited, but an earned conceit, but conceited.  He pauses in chalking his cue, and says to the people on the bar stools, "I really mean it.  I always say that at the beginning of a match."

Things that happened at the airport (From the drafts folder)

1. I kept running my tongue along the roof of my mouth, which I burned on a slice of pizza yesterday.
2. I overheard the Cinnabon girl who was filling my water bottle tell her guy co-worker she had a crush on the magazine kiosk guy across the way. Both she and the kiosk guy looked like teenagers, Asian. I wrote a note that said, "I've noticed you across the way and I think we could have a spark. Come by and say hi sometime. xo, Cinnabon Girl."
I folded it and wrote on the outside READ ME. Then Iris dropped it on his counter when he wasn't looking. We watched him unfold it, read it, smile and shake his head, re-fold the note and put it back in his pocket.
We watched him re-read it and look toward Cinnabon a lot. I bought a gross sandwich from him and heard the tail end of his conversation with another airport employee, a black man in his 50s or 60s: "That's something you don't want to mix up!" Both laughed.
I turned around and noticed there were TWO cute young Cinnabon girls! Ach!
But maybe they both like him.
We saw him write a note and fold it up and put it in his shirt pocket. I'm going to assume he marries one of them.
3. I got mustard in my hair from said gross sandwich.
4. I unintentionally brought a full-size half-empty tube of toothpaste with me in my backpack, and a sleeve of matches which escaped detection.
5. I saw two people I worked with in Talkeetna

To be known

At the Fairview bar I see a waiter from the Roadhouse.  He points at me and yells, "Mushroom swiss quiche with bacon bits on top!" 

We arrive at Mountain High Pizza Pie right as it opens, so the cook takes our order for two waters to start.  He's getting the waters when the waitress walks by and says, "She doesn't like ice in her water."  He dumps out the ice.

Too Bad Montana Gave That Kid Wine

The rooms in the employee housing up the hill have TVs in them.  The channels are limited.  It's not a normal cable package, it's a few chosen ones.  A&E, HGTV, Fox News, HBO Family.  The Alaska Channel, which is actually long advertisements for Alaska properties also owned by the corporation that owns the lodge.

There's an employee photo contest every summer, and this year someone put the photos entered on one of the static channels, along with a radio station that plays 70s songs.  My friend and I watched it tonight and came up with ways each photo illustrated whatever lyrics were playing when it was shown.  Like they were intentional music videos.  ("I don't care what you say anymore this is my life;" a picture of a moose staring at the camera and not giving a shit.)

When he mentioned that the channel used to be just static, I was like "We could have had a public access show all summer."  Wouldn't that have been fun?  A side project for the restless employees, so they'd do something other than stack up three heavy wooden picnic tables and climb onto the roof, for instance.  (I might have thought that idea up and encouraged others to do it, but let the record show I myself did not climb up onto the roof.)  (Troublemaker.)

We imagined commandeering the channel somehow, wearing masks and holding up poster boards with a conversation written on them.  It would have been like that season of the Real World where they had a public access show.  Too bad neither of us plans to come back next year.

In Which I Lie

Guy Who Is Nothing Like the Fonz: People in high school* always told me I reminded them of the Fonz. 

Me: Oh yeah...?

Guy Who Is Nothing Like the Fonz: Yeah, but I don't even know who that is. 

Me: Yeah, me neither.  [winces inwardly at the terrible lie]

Guy Who Is Nothing Like the Fonz: I think he was on like Three's Company or something.

Me: Hmm.  [dies inside]

*High school was like two years ago for him.

"She is NOT a Sagittarius" --from a different conversation at a different job I was eavesdropping on and laughing at

It's my birthday on Friday, I said, and rambled a little.  Then I said, "When is your birthday?"

"November 23," he answered.  This co-worker I only see once a week at 5:30am. 

"So then what's your sign?" I asked.

"Uh... Sagittarius."

"Do you feel like a Sagittarius?"

"Ah... no, not really.  I don't know.  No.  I don't let other people tell me who I am."

-----

Two thoughts:
1. Do people realize my (impertinent) sudden interest in them is not out of nowhere, but out of a self-conscious feeling that I have been talking too much about myself and I would like to immediately balance the conversation back out?  If so, does it make my interest seem insincere?  If so, do they care?
2. That's a good answer.  I DON'T LET OTHER PEOPLE TELL ME WHO I AM.  That's like something Coco Chanel would say.

Recipe Corner

The security guard (not Liz Taylor, a different one) brought me warm, home-cooked food tonight.  I exclaimed over it and was like, "Mmmmm" a bunch of times. 

It was genuinely good, but what made it better is that 1) it has been a long time since I ate non-restaurant food, and 2) I ate it at 3am.

HOW DID YOU MAKE THIS, I asked him. 

Here is the recipe:
1. Brown Italian sausage in olive oil
2. Chop up bok choy, throw in big stem pieces
3. Add a dash of soy sauce
4. Add the smaller leaves of bok choy, along with sliced jalepeno
5. EAT.

Variations we discussed:
Balsamic vinegar instead of soy sauce
Add chopped garlic
Add chopped ginger

Variation I vetoed:
Add pasta

What we discussed while we ate:
1. How Apple Cider Vinegar is wonderous
2. How it tastes good on salad, mixed with olive oil
3. How at Latitude 62, a restaurant/bar/lodging in town, they give you like a bucket (exaggeration) of ranch with your salad
4. How ranch ruins salad
5. How when I was studying abroad in Italy there was this girl who insisted she could not eat pizza without ranch to dip it in, and embarrassed everyone by asking for it everywhere, to the mystification of the Italian waitstaff, and her mom finally mailed her a bunch of ranch packets, which she would MIX AT THE TABLE, in Florence and all other major cities in Italy, and dip her authentic Italian pizza in.  To the disgust/dismay of the Italian waitstaff.
6. How her nickname was Ranch Packets.

Vogue

There's a full-length mirror in the back room of the front desk, and it's right next to the doorway of the managers' office, and I checked myself out as I walked by it, and my manager saw me out of the corner of her eye and was like, "What??" all weirded out/anxious, and I was like, "Oh, what.  Nothing, I was just looking at myself in the mirror.  Haha."  And she laughed with relief and was like, "Oh my gosh, I was like, 'Why is she looking at me like that?!'"

I really don't know what expression I had on... or since she only saw me out of the corner of her eye, what my aura was, or whatever... but I guess it was alarming.

Front Desk Snacks, 2:30am **UPDATE**

Janitor: Can I buy some Skittles?
Me: Yeah but we only have bullshit Tropical Skittles.

---
A week later:
Janitor: It's too bad you still only have these makeshift Skittles.
Me: Shantytown Skittles.

Subtle difference between appliances

Every time I checked the dryer both of my work shirts were in today, it was off and the clothes were still soaked.  This happened three times before I decided to wait in the laundry room to find out what was going on.

After about ten minutes a Bulgarian girl walks into the laundry room and opens all three dryers to check if the loads are dry so she can put her wet clothes in.  She opens a dryer, then closes it, then moves onto the next one.  Do you detect the missing step in this process?

"Are you going to turn those dryers back on?" I ask her.

She turns around.  "It is automatic," she says.

My eyes get big and I smile in disbelief.  "Noo, it's not."  I walk over and show her.

"Oh!" she says and laughs.  "Sorree!"

Every Little Thang

At the Roadhouse the cashier is a pretty young woman whose lips don't lie flush against her teeth, which makes her look French.  She has a bright red hickey on the front-side of her neck the size of a half dollar.  She doesn't smile at me, probably because I am openly checking out her hickey.  To the old man in front of me, though, she says "How's every little thang?"

I finished my quiche quickly, with still a lot of tea in the silver kettle on the table next to my mug, so I carry my mug and Harper's and purse over to the other room, where you can sit by a gas fire and chill.

I am chillin when a guy I know from the lodge walks up with a stroller and sits next to me.  He is twenty-two and has a two-month-old baby.  He reads his newspaper quietly and I read my Harper's, and pretty soon he says, "Ever seen one of these?"

He shows me a black-and-white picture the size of a postage stamp in the Classifieds section.  I look at it closely.  "It's an Ultralight," he says.  Beneath the photo is printed "Ultralight Aircraft Trike."

"No," I say, in a way that invites hearing more.

"An Ultralight's like a cross between a motorcycle and a kite."

"What!"

"Yeah.  They're pretty unsafe.  I think the rate of death in owning one is the same as a smoker's - something like one in three."

"Holy shit," I say, and look at the picture even closer.  "I'm surprised they're legal."

"They barely are," he says.  "I went up in one with a buddy of mine about ten years ago.  It was pretty fun.  We went up about a thousand feet, which is the highest you can get without needing oxygen, and then spiraled down in circles for about twenty minutes until we were close enough to touch down on the Talkeetna air strip."

"Oh my God," I say.  "That sounds really scary, but really fun."

"Yeah."

Companionable silence.

"Have you ever been up on a glacier?" he asks me.

"Yeah, last summer I landed on one.  This summer I flew up around the mountain but we didn't land.  It was fun."

"Yeah," he says, nodding, "It is fun.  One Fourth of July we went up and had a picnic at Base Camp."

"That's cool."

"Yeah, but don't ever smoke a cigarette if you're up that high.  I got altitude sickness really bad."

"Ugh."

"Yeah.  Lack of oxygen.  I got real nauseous, a headache.  It took like twenty minutes to go away."

"You don't smoke anymore, do you?"

"No," he says.  "Or drink.  If I drink I want a smoke.  And I don't have self-control when it comes to drinking, so I know I can't do it."

"Well, that's good you figured it out so young.  What are you, twenty-two?"

"Yeah.  Well really my body figured it out for me.  My senior year of high school I was drunk every night.  Finally a couple days after graduation I couldn't walk, so I went to the doctor's and they said my appendix had burst."

"Oh no!"

"But then they couldn't find it when they opened me up.  But they saw that one of my kidneys had died, and so they took it out, and also part of my liver."

"Oh my God!"

"Yeah.  And then my intestines were swollen and pushed my stomach up to where my lungs were, and my lungs up into my rib cage, and my ribs punctured both lungs."

"Wait, what happened to your appendix?  Is it still floating around in there somewhere?"

"No, it just disintegrated.  They vacuumed it out in little pieces.  Actually the surgeon went on lunch and they brought the janitor in with a mop to clean it out."

I laugh.

"So then they didn't staple up the incision in my stomach very well and it came open.  It looked like a vagina."

I laugh.

"I wasn't the first one to think that, either.  My friends saw it and they were like, 'Dude, that looks like a pussy.'  So I went to the doctor's and they said they wouldn't sew it back up again because they didn't want to trap infection in.  So I just had to let it heal naturally."

"Oh my God.  That's like Alien.  Good thing it did."

"Yeah.  You want to see it?"

It is not every day a young man asks me if I want to see the vagina-scar on his stomach.  I did want to see it but felt shy to say so.  "Do I?" I asked, instead.

He lifted his shirt.  It looked like nothing, like a patch of skin where hair doesn't grow on an otherwise hairy stomach.  "Oh, that's not too bad," I said.

"Yeah," he said as he dropped his shirt, sounding disappointed.

"You should go visit high schools and tell this story so kids know not to drink to excess."

"They wouldn't listen, though."

"Yes they would," I said.  "That's a horrifying story."

"I really wasn't taking care of myself.  I was living on alcohol and Hot Pockets."

He's covered in mosquito bites

"How's your chubby baby?" I ask the morning restaurant supervisor.  I met him a month ago when he was six months.  He had the chubbiest baby legs I had ever seen.  I only held him for a couple seconds before he got fussy and started kicking his chubby little legs around.  It was almost unbearably adorable.

You can only say that about a baby.  For the record she grinned when I asked that question.

Questions that would not make a person grin:

"How's your chubby boyfriend?"
"How's your chubby wife?"
"How's your chubby daughter?"
"How's your chubby dog?"
"How's your chubby uncle?"
"How's your chubby life?"

Baby Cats

I have just met the new shuttle driver, and she is telling me about her son who also works at the lodge, and his fiancee Jolene, and their new baby.  The son and his fiancee are in their early 20s.  I ask the shuttle driver how they met.

"Well it's a funny story cause Jolene was actually married to someone else when they first met," she begins.  I immediately switch from listening out of politeness to listening out of genuine interest.  "Her husband now, he worked on the Slope, so he'd be gone weeks at a time.  And then when he was home he didn't do nothing with her, and Jolene's real active, she likes to go out and do stuff.  So he appointed Forrest as her substitute husband, because he was willin to go out and do stuff with her.  Sure enough, one thing led to another..."

"And they fell in love," I say.  That, right there, is why people tell me shit.  I didn't finish her sentence, "And they started having unprotected sex," or "And she started cheating on him."  I (outwardly) assume love.

"That's right," she says, nodding.  "But they didn't get together til after she and her husband broke up."

I nod, like, of course.

"And the thing is, she asked him to get her a dog.  She woulda been happy with a dog to take her on walks.  Jolene loves walks.  But her husband just kept bringing home all these baby cats."

I shake my head in dismay.  Baby cats?  For Jolene? 

"What's Jolene gonna do with a buncha baby cats?  They can't take her on any walks.  She needed a dog."

I nod again.
---

Thoughts:
1. I really wish more strangers would tell me intimate gossip. 
2. If you name your child Jolene she will become involved with adultery.
3. As someone who needs more Alone Time in a relationship than the average person, and who adores baby cats, I think I should try to track down Jolene's first husband and see if we can give it a go.  Added bonus: most guys who work on the Slope make around $40/hour.
4. I really want to meet Jolene.  Her mother-in-law painted such a vivid picture of her.  Fingers crossed I run into her someday, and fingers crossed she's not a self-googler (although I feel like if you are willing to tell strangers intimate gossip you can't get mad when they put it on the internet, so if she should be mad at anyone for this blog post it's her mother-in-law).

Nacho Cheesier

I drove five guys to Anchorage on Wednesday. 

But let's back up a minute: on Tuesday I drove the taxi from 4pm to 4am.  Then I slept from 5am to 10am Wednesday morning.  Then I drove the taxi back to town where it belongs, and saw the guy who runs it. 

"We've got five climbers who want a ride to Anchorage.  Three Russians and two Canadians.  They need to leave in ten minutes.  You'll have to take the 15-passenger van.  You want to do it?"

"How much of the fare do I get to keep?"

"A hundred.  And whatever they tip you."

My phone was on its last bar of battery power, I hadn't eaten breakfast, and I didn't remember how to get to Anchorage.  

"Okay."