I'm trying to be brave.

I've been searching at InternshipPrograms.com for summer internships. It's a very scary thing to do. It's interesting, though. They have listings for all kinds of cool places, like Ms. Magazine and Jim Henson productions and most importantly Random House. Random House is a place I could actually see myself working at for an extended period of time. Well, from what I know about it now, anyway. The publishing business in general is pretty interesting to me. Of course, I'm interested in anything where books are involved.

But I've already made a resume and cover letter for the Ms. Magazine one. It's in New York City. That part doesn't scare me, exactly. It's my parents' possible reactions to it that scare me. I've mentioned summer internships around the house and they seem to think that'd be a good idea. But they're thinking I'd still be in Chautauqua County. I haven't mentioned anything to make them think otherwise and I probably won't. At least not until someone calls wanting an interview.

My parents won't be happy. It wouldn't surprise me at all if they both clammed up at the idea. My dad is usually better than my mom about me wanting to go places and do things... as long as those things don't involve a city. My dad has lived in this county his entire life, minus one semester where he lived two hours away. He gets very uncomfortable at the idea of a city. Although Washington doesn't seem to bother him too much... the capital district part of it, anyway. But even when we go there, we generally have to stay at least a half hour outside of the city. Basically, any place with fluoridated water is too urban for him. Sewers, too. I doubt he'd ever want to live anywhere that had a sewer system.

I'll lose them both if I even accept an interview in New York City. I doubt I could get away with doing one in Rochester.

And that is a very scary idea. For obvious reasons, I guess. I mean, this semester was the longest I ever stayed away from my parents... and there I talked to them on the phone everyday. I still don't really have any friends. None that I trust enough to ask for advice, anyway. And if my parents are both too mad to talk in complete sentences to me, who am I going to talk to?

Because they would get that mad.

There's no doubt about it. I mean, I mentioned what happened when I was scheduled to go to Europe. And that was a 5-day chaperoned trip!

That's why I haven't mentioned it. If I mention, they'll talk me out of it. They always do. And I don't want them to talk me out of it. The Random House internship is only available to students the summer before their senior year of college. That's me, now, 17 or not, and I don't want to be talked out of at least trying for it. I have to try for it. If I don't, I'll always wonder what would've happened if I did. So I will.

Although I have no idea what I'll do if they actually call and want me to go there for an interview. I'd probably tell them then. They'd either get mad and I'd go by myself or my dad would take me... there's really no point in going by myself without knowing.

Of course, what would probably happen is they would both get really mad, and my dad would take me because my mom would absolutely have a nervous breakdown sitting home knowing I went by myself and we would have a miserable trip because he wouldn't want to talk to me but it's hard not to talk to someone you're sharing a hotel room with... and we'd have to share a hotel room cuz my dad would never pay for two rooms for two people.



Okay, so I'm obsessing.

Especially when you consider that I haven't even sent anything out yet. (One of them is all ready, like I said, but it has my school number on it and I don't want to send it until I'm sure I'd be there when they called. Besides, it's much easier to mail something secretly when you don't have to borrow the car to do it.)



Definitely need a new topic.

I just started reading "The Shining" ...it's already scary and I'm only 100 pages into it. 'Course that's probably because I expected it to be scary. My mom bought it for me and started telling me stories about how she was reading it one night when she was alone in the house and she had to stop because her heart was pounding so much.

Okay, need a new topic that doesn't involve parents.

Of course, that isn't possible, because I'm at home and it is technically their home and I am completely surrounded by reminders of that.

Ani's new cd- Up Up Up Up Up UP was theoretically mailed to my house Monday. It's coming out of Buffalo, which, if you don't account for the fact that Buffalo is still almost shut down, means it should take almost no time at all to get here. I could get it tomorrow. :-) That would be very exciting, since, until today, I had the dates screwed up. The actual deal was that if they got your order by the 8th they'd ship the 11th. I for some reason was thinking they were shipping the 8th, and went down to the mailbox five times on Monday thinking it'd be there. Going to the mailbox is no small feat- it involves getting bundled up, wearing enormous boots, walking down a really steep, really snowy, really slippery driveway, and then down a length of road that is right on a curve (which drivers always take too fast) and now the snow is plowed so deep that you're practically walking in the road instead of on the shoulder, since the shoulder is covered by snow up to my shoulders. (not an exaggeration.) Then you get to the mailbox, wipe the snow from in front of it, open it up, brush the snow from the inside (how the plow gets snow inside the mailbox, I will never know) and then check for the cd. Then you turn around, walk back down the road, up the really slippery driveway, and inside, where you take your boots off and curl up on the couch with a blanket for a half hour until you're warm enough to try it again. When we got the newspaper delivered to the house, you'd have to do it at least twice- once around 2:30pm to get the mail (it's usually there at 2:30, unless the weather's bad. Monday it wasn't there until 5:30) and then you'd have to go back down to get the paper, which didn't usually get there until after 6pm. We live out in the sticks and they have rural driving routes where they give some poor soul a driving route that takes about 6 hours at top speed in good weather and tell him or her to drive it really slow, pulling over at every other house to put a newspaper in a little box.

We don't get the newspaper anymore, though. Our newspaper is extremely conservative, to the point that it publishes and "editor's voting guide" every year listing the names of every Republican running for office. (It's not a joke- I actually know of people who vote based on it.) ...and a year ago November the people they didn't like got voted into city council and just before I left for school they took a field trip of sorts to some town in California that is supposed to be a lot like ours, only with a good economy, to see how they do things. Then, the newspaper actually had somebody call out there, find out where they had stayed and how much the spent, and then call around until they found a hotel that said they would've given them a better rate, and wrote a huge article about how the city council was wasting the taxpayers money by sleeping two-to-a-room in the Best Western instead of in the Budget Inn.

My mom got disgusted and canceled the paper.

I thought it was hilarious.

Of course, none of that really applies to us- we're not eligible to vote in those city council elections. Too far out in the country. I don't think my town even has a mayor. Either way, you still have to drive about 10 minutes to get to the voting station.

The funny thing is, ever since I started kindergarten I had friends come over to my house and ask me how I stand to live this close to the city! You should see the places some of my friends lived... It's a farming district, always has been. 7th graders are required to take metal shop, and to get out of metal shop you have to sit through a five week unit on farm safety, which includes the lovely experience of driving a tractor outside in the rain, demonstrating you know how to do it safely. (He waits for a rainy day to do that part.) Anyway... "J.A." lived on a dirt road, about a 10 minute walk from the closest neighbors. One of my friends from elementary school lived on a dirt road in the middle of the woods in an area with five houses- all of them had her cousins or grandparents or some other various relative living in them.

That's not uncommon. I'd say the majority of the teachers I had in school (elementary all the way to ninth grade) had had at least one of my dad's brothers or sisters - several had had all of them. (my dad's mom had 6 kids in 6 years... and one more a couple years later.) My dad knew basically all my friends' parents - either he went to school with them or one of his siblings did. ("J.A." was the only exception. She moved here from Oklahoma or some place like that when we were in 4th grade. I never got that story quite straight.) My dad could literally go to a school play that I was in and tell me who the parents were for at least 50% of the kids in the play.

Even the land we live on has history- my dad inherited it from his Grandma, who used to live here. Her house was falling down and they signed some sort of agreement that said he had control of the land as long as he built a new house on it and let her live there until she died. She died before he finished the house. Really, he still isn't finished with it. But I've lived in it my whole life. The most moving I've ever done was bedrooms - I've had three bedrooms in the house. I generally take them over as soon as he finishes them. There are only three bedrooms in the house, though, and he seems to be done building new ones, so I'll probably be in the one I'm in for a while now. There was some talk about turning my old toy room into a bedroom, but that doesn't seem to be happening. It's still a toy room.

This house is practically my whole life. I can go through it and show you, there's the pencil marks where I measured peoples' height. I did it on the stairs, and my mom couldn't understand why I'd want to do that, since you wouldn't be able to compare them. I didn't understand why she didn't understand, since I figured you could just look at the tape measure and compare them.

I can show you the corner in the living room that shows you how small it used to be and how big it is since my dad extended it. It was fun while he was doing it... I was probably still in kindergarten, and he built the extention and then knocked the drywall off the wall... leaving the beams... and you could walk through the wall, with the beams still there, and you could pretend you were in a cage. My cousin Joey helped him do that.

He did the same thing in the kitchen... I can show you the corner there, too. My favorite part of the house is the roof, though. We've redone the roof twice now, that I can remember. The first time I was in my Little House phase and had just reread the one where they move west (again) and have a house raising party, where everybody comes to help build the house and mama and Mary stay inside and cook a huge meal for everybody and Laura's supposed to help too, but she wants to help the men on the roof. And my dad had to redo the roof, and it was in the middle of summer, and he took some days off work and he was working on it and I'd go up and keep him company, even though it was a really high roof and I was probably only in third grade or so... and then a couple days into, after he'd taken all the old shingles off, and I think he was laying down the tarpaper, my mom took the day off and two of my dad's brothers took the day off, and it was the middle of summer so my cousin Joey had the day off, and they all showed up and were doing the roof together and my mom was in the kitchen cooking an enormous meal and I thought it was the neatest thing ever because it was just like a house raising party. I told my mom that, I think she thought I was silly.

I know every tree and every flower that is on this land... I know their names and whether or not you can eat them, and if you can, how. I even have stories about most of them, like the little Blue Spruce in the front yard that I brought home from school in a paper towel in second grade... the high school Future Farmers of America club was giving them out as part of their "save the trees" campaign. It's still there. It's up to my knee, now, I think. And the huge maple right out front, that's my dad's favorite tree, and how two summers in a row we'd be out there every day, squishing the catipillars with a rock so they wouldn't grow up to be moths who'd eat the trees. And my dad put tar on the really bad spots... you can see how the tree is healing and pushing the tar out.

I know the creek the best, though. My cousin Jeanie baby-sat me all summer long when I was little. My dad worked nights, and he was asleep upstairs. All I wanted to do for two summers in a row... i was probably 7 and 8, since Jeanie is exactly ten years older than me, and she stopped baby-sitting when she graduated high school.... all I wanted to do was walk up and down the creek catching crayfish in a bucket. We had two little green fish catchers, that they sell so you can take your fish out of the bowl while you clean it... we caught the little ones with them, but the big ones you had to catch with your hands. I knew every square inch of that creek, and it amazed me, ever spring, I'd go back down there, and it'd be different. The snow melting and the winter in general would change everything about the creek, and I'd have to get to know it all over again. One year, there was this great little pool, that came up to about my waist, and the perfect place to jump into it, off this fallen log. The next year, another log fell in a different place and made it so the water was barely up to my calves there, but downstream a little ways there was another deeper puddle you could jump in. That one was at the bottom of a waterfall that was covered in moss and I thought it was the prettiest thing ever. The water fall was about four feet, straight up and down, but there were little spots where the rock went in and the water kept going straight so there were little tiny caves covered in moss and I was sure fairies lived in them.

One day, that year, Jeanie couldn't come, I don't remember why, so Joey came instead, and he went in the creek with me, and we were hunting crayfish and he picked up the biggest rock I had ever seen anybody pick up and there was an enormous crayfish under it and I caught it and I couldn't stop talking about it for three days- how he picked up that rock that I could hardly budge.

I think I called them crabs until I was 8 or so and realized something about the term "catching crabs" made people uncomfortable so I started calling them crayfish like Michelle did. Michelle's a cousin too- she was my best friend for about 3rd-6th grade. I didn't figure out the "catching crabs" thing till last year.

The thing about all this is- I was not unusual. In fourth grade we did some sort of science project on crayfish. I can't even remember what they're really called. Crayfish or crawfish or something like that except I think there was some other name we were supposed to know that no one used. But there wasn't a person in the class (except maybe "J.A." that was the year she moved there) who had never held a crayfish before... and one of the kids lived next to the school and went hunting for them in the creek behind the school all the time. That one was a lot bigger than the creek by my house and the crayfish got bigger. He brought in the biggest one he caught... we measured its pinchers with a ruler and they were five inches long and someone gave it a pencil and it broke it.

There aren't any crayfish in the creek by my house. We had a really bad winter when I was in fifth grade, maybe, and I think they all got washed downstream. Either that or I killed them off. That ecosystem was definitely not designed with a 7 year old in mind.