All y'all Californians are just jealous.

I knew it would be a rough landing. You can’t just go to California, spend two weeks lolling about on all 800 available sleeping surfaces at Hotel 519 and generally forgetting that you didn’t always have a cocktail at 5 p.m. sharp, and think that going back to New Haven would be easy.

Actually, the first few days back were pretty mellow. A 40th birthday party on Saturday with a red attire requirement allowed me to spend a good part of the afternoon painting my finger nails candy apple red. Then there was the birthday itself, an event full of powerful margaritas and swaying/sloshing speeches, followed much later by a peaceful drive home from Danbury along winding route 34. All the way back to New Haven, the sun trailed behind me in my rear view mirror, doing its best impression of a giant flaming nectarine as it sank towards the horizon in the 85 degree heat.

I would have stayed at the party longer it not for Hazmat. Hazmat is the petite tabby that chooses to live with my advisor, Craig. While Craig and his brood drive all over tarnation visiting relatives, it is my duty to make sure that Chez Roy is kept in good order. Essentially, aside from some minor plant watering and mail gathering, this means dispensing Whiskas in a timely manner and spending at least a half hour letting Hazmat throw herself against me and prod me with her declawed front paws. In return for my services, I have been given the gift of Grad Student Gold: access to a house with multiple air conditioning units and a super sized washer/dryer in the basement. Oh. Yeah.

But then of course, Monday happened. I started off Monday as I usually do, masochistically, at the gym at 6:15 a.m.. Or at least I tried to start off that way. As I trudged past the front desk, the normally rather drowsy attendant bellowed at me,

“Excuse me! You need a sticker! EXCUSE ME!!”

I stopped and blinked at her for a few seconds. I almost started walking again, assuming that she must have been talking to some other person much further away, as such bellowing was hardly necessary to reach me, an arm’s length away.

“A STICKER. You need A STICKER.”

My silent blinking must have been misinterpreted as poor hearing. Fair enough.

“But I thought we didn’t have to pay for the gym this summer. No paying, no sticker? It’s free for students now, right? See, I have a student ID.”

Not so articulate at dark-fifteen in the morning.

“You still need a sticker.”

“Oh.”

“You’ll have to come back here between ten and two. But before you can get a gym sticker, you’ll need to get a summer sticker. Those are at the HGS, not here. You’ll have to call them and see when they’re available.”

I was back to my silent blinking phase. My ID, which had granted me trouble-free access to the treadmills upstairs just two weeks before, now dangled unstickered and useless in my hand. Why has Yale gone sticker crazy in my absence? What is the meaning of all these stickers?

“Uh… Umm…”

I couldn’t make words. It was all so abrupt and I was so sleepy and wrestling free from my tangled sheets had been so hard after an all-night battle of Eva vs. humidity. All this sticker business was putting me close to the edge.

“Could I just work out this morning and come back for the stickers?”

I tried to make this sound polite and not overly pathetic. She glared at me for a moment longer before muttering something about “ten and two” and waving me on.

The day didn’t improve much from there. A few hours later, I was trying to remove the vacuum-sealed plastic from the See’s chocolates I’d brought for my lab. My normally excellent razor blade skills escaped me as I drew a clean slice across the back of the box and then into my finger. After an hour, the bleeding stopped enough for some gauze to take over from the wad of paper towel and it was time to get back in the car for The Great Sticker Adventure.

I made it across town and finally found what seemed to be the last parking spot in the city of New Haven. Shortly after throwing the car in park I discovered that the plastic case that normally holds both my ID and my stockroom card now only contained the later. My ID was sitting happily in my lab coat pocket back at Ranch Legionella. No proof of Yalie status (in other words, no ID), no summer enrollment sticker. No summer enrollment sticker, no inexplicable gym sticker.

“*@#&#$*!!!”

So as to salvage some part of my trip out, I got out of the car to walk to the post office to buy stamps. When I returned, I found that I had slammed the car door on the sweatshirt that had been draped loosely on the back of the driver seat. The door’s locking mechanism had punched a greasy hole through the shoulder and sleeve.

That’s when I gave up. I drove back to lab and just sort of floated through the rest of my day, trying not to touch anything or talk to anyone. Now I’m back at Chez Roy with an air conditioning unit blowing directly on my neck. There is fur all over my keyboard from a recent visit from Hazmat and I can hear the dryer rumbling downstairs. Mmm… clean sheets. I’m pretty much back to the silent, blinking phase, but I’m trying to pull out of it. After all, tomorrow I have to be prepared to do it all again – I still don’t have my stickers.

Eva vs. The Umbrella

Don't be fooled. It is eeeeevil.
Originally uploaded by littlee.

I’ve been neglecting you, oh few but loyal readers of Little e's Big Adventure. It seems a little lame, or just a bit too obvious to say it, but I’ve been busy. For the entire, seemingly endless month of May I was caught up in grading and graduation madness. Then, grades submitted and graduates packed off back to their respected postdocs, I returned to lab a little while back only to discover a very nasty item penciled in on Wednesday, June 1st:

“thesis cmte mtg 2p”

Maybe other, more normal graduate students, when facing the prospect of presenting to their thesis committee would simply shrug and say, ‘Well? I’ve published a paper since we last met. That’s pretty good. I’ll show’em what I’ve got and see what they say.’

Not me though. I like to get crazy about these things. I like to lose perspective about the body’s actual requirements for nutrition and rest. I like to see if through vague replies and some careful scheduling, I can manage to conceal from my friends that I’ve spent Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights in lab, squirting small amounts of liquid from one tube to the next.

And because I like to be this irrational, overly driven person, I am proud to say that The Crazy did pay off. Jorge, Walther, Susan and Craig all arrived within 10 minutes of the actual scheduled start time and nodded and smiled for the next hour while I walked them through 15 sparsely designed, but deceptively crammed PowerPoint slides. There were lots of good suggestions, many of which I will ignore, but some of which may make it into my next paper. My private shame for having bowed to the ridiculous tradition of providing food for my committee (strawberries, ginger cookies and bottled water) was ultimately erased by the satisfaction I felt looking a Craig’s bewildered face as I reeled out new, extremely cool data I’d been carefully hiding from him for a week.

Unfortunately, the high of a good committee meeting only carried me till about 5 p.m., at which time I was forced to admit that I had, in fact, been coming down with a wicked cold since the morning of the day before. And now, thanks to my stupid theories of non-sleeping and little eating, I sit propped up in bed in the fading light of my second straight day of fever, aches, sneezing and way, way too much mint tea. And because all this bed rest and shuffling about in slippers has left me more than a little Eeyore-ish, I will now relate my most Eeyore worthy story. It is the story of a broken umbrella.

I believe the roots of this story can be traced back to the middle of this past winter, during my trip home to The Bubble for Christmas. I believe this would have been the first time I laid eyes on my mom's snazzy ShedRain umbrella - a sleek object of graceful, utilitarian design. I must have borrowed it for some trip out, and I remember my feeling of glee when I realized that in pressing the small button on the handle, not only could I snap the umbrella open in an instant, but by simply pressing the button again, I could effortlessly collapse it closed: with a slightly damp but totally satisfying *whoosh*, the spidery metal legs of the umbrella folded neatly onto themselves. Though startled by the genius of this umbrella’s design, I was not at all surprised that my mother possessed such a fine species of foul weather protection. She is, after all, the master of all things Consumer Reports recommended. Surely an item requiring such heavy use during California's epic winter would have been thoroughly researched before purchase.

And while I am slightly embarrassed to admit it, this umbrella was forcing me to rethink a deep-seated hostility I’d developed towards all umbrella-kind. All the minor battles I've waged scrambling into cars or through front doors, the rain soaking me anyway as my wet, cold fingers pinching frantically at that nasty sharp pin stubbornly holding my umbrella open. With this simple invention - the automatic umbrella closed button - these battles would be no more. I would no longer soak myself fighting with the very object meant to keep my dry!

Indeed, this umbrella was on the verge of ending my lengthy boycott of umbrellas that began when I moved to New York City in 1999. Though I had been a great fan of umbrellas before this move, an early run with a giant golf umbrella carelessly brandished by a fellow pedestrians taught me that a simple rain coat and nimble foot work would be necessary to stay dry and keep my eyesight on the Upper East Side. From then on, as I bobbed and weaved down the sidewalk’s obstacle course of vicious spokes, I derived great happiness whenever I saw the skeletons of umbrellas destroyed by Manhattan's strong winds blowing up York Avenue or crumpled and stuffed into garbage cans. Death to the eye poking menaces!!

But I digress... back to my trip to The Bubble.

Though I don't remember doing so I must have made quite a display of my infatuation with my mom’s brilliantly designed umbrella. And because my mom is a most excellent mom, a mom who is always listening, the next time I headed west, for Sophia's 30th birthday bash in January, I found a brand new one of my very own waiting for me on the ottoman in my bedroom. To think, it closes on its own AND it fits in a baggie the size of a hot dog. I swoon! I faint!

Sadly, honeymoon was short. Throwing superstition to the wind, I quickly unwrapped my new toy and pressed the magic button right there in my room. *Whap!* Up it went, the putty colored fabric stretching out tightly over the frame. My excitement bubbling over, I pushed the button again to witness the remarkable automatic refolding.

*push*

(nothing.)

*push push push*

(nothing still. umbrella remains proudly open, arms outstretched.)

*PUUUUUUSH*

(my thumbnail turns red and then white from the pressure. nothing.)

A few minutes later, after pushing and prodding and a little bit of swearing, my umbrella inexplicably snaps shut. A glutton for punishment, I push the button again. Again, it springs open. After a few more minutes of fighting to close it, I leave it propped on the floor, pretending perhaps that needs to dry. and I head downstairs.

"Whatever,” I said happily has hopped down the stairs to the kitchen to thank my mom. “It's fresh out of the box - it just needs to work the kinks out."

Despite my optimism, this pattern of intermittent functioning persisted upon my return to Connecticut. But I learned to love my umbrella as I love all things that make my life as a pedestrian more tolerable, and forgave it for its defects because it was a gift from my mom. As the weeks and storms went by I figured out a few tricks that reduced the umbrella closing ritual to a wrestling match lasting less than a minute. And I also resigned myself to what must have been a sort of karmic backlash for all the times I snickered at the mutilated umbrella carcasses drifting down York Avenue. Who knew umbrellas could be vindictive?

Fast forward to a last week. Though May is speeding toward June, here along the Long Island Sound the skies are grey and the winds are blustery. Though the rain did cease for a few blessed hours for Yale graduation, the general forecast had been thunderstorms followed by dense fog with a hailstorm to follow combined with a high wind advisory. Hurrah! By 5 p.m., the skies had again put on their threatening gunmetal look and the gusting winds were having a blast kicking up trash and knocking any remaining petals out of the flowering cherry trees.

As I walked back to lab after a meeting across campus the rain finally started to fall and I reached into my bag for my not-so-trusty-but-still-quite-nice mom umbrella. Just as I pressed the button to pop it open, a strong gust of wind swept up from behind, causing me to stumble forward and blowing my umbrella inside out.

"No worries. I'll just do the little turn into the wind trick, the wind'll blow her back to normal and I'll be on my way."

No dice. Though the strong wind did its job and pushed the spokes in the opposite direction, the result was not a normal dome-shape. Instead, my temperamental friend had tucked into a sort of cramped, praying mantis configuration, refusing to extend or retract so much as an inch. I hurried the last few blocks down College in the rain, trying to keep a grip on my unwieldy umbrella that had become both floppy and rigid at the same time. Once inside, I could feel my old anti-umbrella hatred finally surging back with full force. I fell to pinching and tugging at what appeared to be the springs and wires that would make this ungrateful beast retract. After a good long while of muttering and mounting rage, I gave up. I didn’t want to actually break it; it was a present from my mom after all. I left the cursed thing half crouching, half laying in the hallway outside my lab, looking just like those ruined umbrellas I used to scorn…

Ever my mother's daughter, and in honor of Lianne, I decided to resolve my predicament by contacting ShedRain customer service. In an e-mail, I explained both the history of malfunction and the now persistent rigor mortis that prevented me from using or storing this object with any grace. As I would also be unable to fit this demon into anything smaller than a TV box, I also asked for suggestions on how they planned to carry out the inspection/repair/replacement component of the ShedRain lifetime guarantee.

Having assumed that I would never get a response to my somewhat manic rantings, today I was more than please to received a very nice e-mail from Christine in customer service. I could not be more thrilled at what she has instructed me to do. It seems that I must send the umbrella back. In addition, Christina informs me,

"... it may be necessary to force the umbrella to close. We understand that this may cause the umbrella to break, but it is sometimes the only way to get it into a box."

I believe that if I'm reading this correctly, Christina is actually instructing me to break my umbrella. She knows it will not close. She knows it must get smaller to fit inside a reasonable shipping container. Thus, she has granted me permission to do what I now so desperately want to do. To take this cursed beast of an umbrella, to take it to the trash-strewn abandoned lot behind my apartment building and to reenact the classic printer destruction scene from the movie “Office Space.” Then I will put it in a box, ship it back to Portland and patiently wait the four to five weeks for my replacement umbrella to arrive.

When it does, I hope that my conscience will be clear of the guilt I already feel for maliciously destroying a gift so lovingly given to be by my mom, and I will try to accept this new umbrella with an open heart and mind, without the cynical expectation that it, too, will plot against me like its evil brethren did before.