I had to switch gears with what I would be writing about for awhile, moving from ridiculously random adventures of discovery and new horizons to even more ridiculous adventures of rediscovery of my own little island (and by little I mean an island that is as long as the country of Belgium is wide…200 km… check it out on Google maps.)
I think it began with little things that tipped me off to the fact that reentry would be a little more difficult than expected… namely… forgetting English words and proper sentence structure (I had to struggle to find the word for “butcher” relying on descriptions such as “meat cutting person” AND asked my dad if he “took” a beer…)
More importantly the first morning back I stumbled downstairs looking forward to educating and enlightening my parents (and consequently the rest of this continent) in the wonders that is Italian coffee… Now, my stove in Italy was a gas stove, like the one back home, that instead had to be lit manually, usually with a lighter or flint… depending on what I could find first around the important. After 6 months of grappling with this way to produce the perfect cup of coffee, like countless numbers of our European ancestors, I sought to replicate the Old World in the New…one…with much of the same, let’s just say, unexpected, results of our ancestors.
Standing downstairs, back home, in the kitchen, I asked my mom for a match and proceeded to turn on the gas, waiting for the smell which would tell me to hang up and redial….So the gas was on, and I took the match to it… the only problem was that I forgot we have a pilot light for this stove meaning that…in the end I came very close to lighting most of my downstairs on fire…
Funny how subtle life can be…huh?
Amongst other things I started working again, after 6 months of, well…let’s just say a very Italian paced life. Now, I work for the Town of Islip as a lifeguard; a seemingly benign position…right? Please?
Wrong.
Let me just lay the ground work and paint a picture for you of the beautiful bureaucratic machine that is the Town Islip…First things first… the Republican party has been in power here since the dawn of time meaning that in order to get any job, anything…. You have to be a Republican. I dealt with this moral dilemma last summer, but please, don’t ask me what party I’m registered with…even I won’t like the answer that comes out of my mouth. I have, probably at least 10 bosses depending on who tries to stop by the pool to exercise their authority by making us poor, underpaid lifeguards (at 12 dollars an hour) perform such menial tasks as enforcing rules and shaving in an effort to uphold town policy. My favorite was the most recent case of all the lifeguards being up in arms about the new Town shaving policy…that’s right… now, not only do we have to save you, but we have to look pretty damn good and well kempt doing it. So no facial hair…
Except for mustaches?
Delightful, huh?
Although the Town isn’t particularly good at doing anything of value other than make rules that are never enforced, they seem to have a really good handle on showing everyone who’s in charge, namely operating under the “we say jump, you say how high” paradigm…whilst employing people almost entirely under the age of 25. Imagine that dog who just can’t seem to get a handle on its hormones and humps anything in sight. See where the conflict arises?
They also make us wear realllllly short shorts.
Most recently, and I have to say my favorite endeavor thus far was one of the recertification courses we had to do…at 6 AM…at the town’s lakefront facility…in Ronkonkoma, about 20 minutes from my house all the way on the other (and obviously for that reason, wrong, side of the town.)
Lakes. Skeeve. Me. Out. I grew up 10 minutes from the ocean and take comfort in my large waves, unreasonably salty water and rip currents that could take me out to sea in 2.2. At least I’m prepared for all that. I am never prepared for dealing with the murky and squishy bottoms of lakes and can never seem to get out of my head that scene in Friday the 13th when that little freaking creature takes one last stand and tries to pull his last unsuspecting victim thinking she had survived the night’s terror by escaping in a boat out to the center of the lake, down to the murky depths.
So, I don’t like lakes.
On top of that Lake Ronkonkoma has a number of special reputations, most of which luckily I found out afterwards, otherwise I might have woken up at 5 AM for absolutely nothing.
Lake Ronkonkoma is a kettle lake, meaning that it is OBSCENELY deep…upwards of 70 feet in some spots. It was believed for awhile not to have a bottom, but rather to be connected to a series of under ground aquifers that would eventually lead you to either the Long Island Sound or Ocean…stuff sinks in and can almost assuredly never be found.
Super. That was what I knew besides the fact that it is incredibly gross.
What I didn’t know, however, is that the water level in the lake can’t be explained by seasonal trends…namely meaning that the water level my or may not rise during a drought and fall during times of massive rain… meaning that simply that it’s fucked up. On top of the creepy fluctuations in the water is the ghost of a Native American princess who likes to lure unsuspecting male swimmers to their deaths... She feel through the lake ice while mourning the loss of her husband and apparently has never gotten over it. Apparently people have seen strange glowing in the lake at night and have heard voices luring them out further.
WTF.
This is of course where the town decides to put their facility? Figures.
We watched interesting videos with model lifeguards impressing upon us the values of using safety gloves when putting on a Band Aid during the training then proceeded outside to practice our Baywatch jump and run off the lifeguard stand and out into the water. I made sure to keep my feet off the bottom of the lake at all times.
I’m not kidding around, lakes freak me out.
Then they threw us a curveball…much to the tune of mustaches but not goatees. In the swimming area were two cones that had to be retrieved before we could leave. We had to practice sweeping the swimming area as if we were looking for a body.
Ok… ready for this.
We had to stand in a line and slowly walk across the swimming area feeling for the bottom and anything that would be lurking and ready to pull us under in the seaweed. Once the water got too deep we would have to dive.. swim a meter or two in a line… then surface… feeling for more bodies through the seaweed…then BACK up to the person most behind and repeat the process.
I thought of Friday the 13th immediately.
After our tedious back and forth dives across the swimming area, opening my eyes in and feeling through murky lake water and some sort of plant life I care not to encounter ever again I spotted the second cone… and almost drowned (being sacrificed to that bitch Native American princess) when I tried to scream that I found it.
We were victorious…everybody out of the water!!!!
Except.. oh wait… the idiot running the clinic forgot one part… dry and up on the beach, we dropped our towels and warily waded our way back into the murky abyss.
Bummerrrrrrrrrr.
After this whole endeavor I was very happy to take a shower and get a bagel, trying to comfort myself after a close encounter with toxic, haunted water. Never again!
KBYE.
Back by popular demand....
Ok. So after staying silent for over two months I think it’s time I pick up, not so much where I left off, but at least enough that I can CPR my writing out of cardiac arrest (forgive the first aid reference, I’m constantly surrounded by it at work…more to come later.)
Ummm… to start off can I just mildly assert my frustration that in all the movies, nobody shows what happens AFTER the great adventure…. I mean, what the hell did Frodo do after throwing the ring back in Mount Doom; he couldn’t have been content going back to Hobbiton to finish out his freaking days (oh wait…. He did move on, bad example).. Ok Julia Roberts in Pretty Women; do they get up and go back to NY, do they live happily ever after. Movies seem to happily gloss over the day to day comings and goings and how people deal with life after a great adventure.
Now how do I deal (or not for that matter).
I guess we are going to have to step back in time a moment to almost a month and a half ago when I was getting ready to leave Italy… My last week there to be more precise. Needless to say, I wasn’t quite sitting still… In three days I had accomplished the seemingly impossible… an overnight in Roma with my friend Maria Paola, who’s family was gracious enough to host me for whatever brief period of time I was down there, then to Bologna for a quick overnight and to send off Rocco, then off to Milano that very same day after to meet my fathers’ cousins and show them around the city for a bit.
All this with the understanding that my landlord would be coming that Friday not only to inspect the apartment but also hand me my delicious 500 Euro security deposit check for which I had labored countless hours cleaning my idiot roommates dirty dishes and shit around the apartment trying to keep it in a presentable state…
Very much a Sisyphean task by the end, but I did make a valiant effort.
(I know it seems ridiculous that I’m glossing over the juicy details of an amazing overnight trip to Rome and whirlwind day to Bologna and Milan, but the nerve wracking stories are so much more interesting and fun to spell out; if you want to see/here about nice things, come stop by and I’ll bore you with photos…forever.)
I wasn’t in the best of moods coming to the end of my stay in Italy and hadn’t slept very well towards the end of the week, so as you will soon see, this added to the debacle.
So…. I walk into my landlords office neither bright eyed nor busy tailed that fateful Friday morning hoping that my weeks notice of departure and up and at’em attitude would see me with check in hand by later that morning.
Italy struck again.
Not only did the landlord forget about the inspection but he also forgot to even get authorization to issue the check….a painstaking procedure which would have taken all of two phone calls.
I was livid.
You see, we had been screwed over many times before with this guy, including but not limited to surprise pop ins to show the apartment, threats to use our deposits to hire a cleaning service to clean the apartment, and, my favorite, trying to blame the guys living upstairs for structural damage to the apartment during a torrential down pour.
Yeah, this guy was a piece. of. work.
After careful negotiation and a considerable amount of ripping into this poor guy like it was my job (armed not only with a command of the Italian language that even surprised me but also a New York sense of “don’t fuck me over”) I convinced him that stopping by would probably be the best idea seeing as I was to leave the city the day after. He miraculously was able to pencil me in between an appointment and overwhelmingly stressful two hour lunch break…and threatened that the apartment better be in order.
Oh it was. Not only was I equipped with Italian words and my rediscovered New York attitude, but also the ability to clean objects simply by staring at the in ire…. Needless to say it got done….sucka.
I returned to the apartment fuming, anyway. I guess the best image you can have is in your head at this point is one of those really pissed off sharks that keeps on swimming around the shark cage of two poor travel channel hosts wondering why they hadn’t been assigned the show Passport to Europe.
He arrives.
Much to his chagrin the parts of the apartment I was responsible for were impeccable. You see, this guy operates under the attitude not only of guilty until proven innocent, but also has the uncanny habit to spot tiny things out of place, which in an apartment where there nearly a constant turnover of students, happens to be just about everything. After foraying a series of ridiculous questions concerning the abysmal state of our 20 year old kitchen chairs and a mysterious shelf that appeared on my armoir, it was time for my rebuttal.
What about the check? The bank isn’t open later on, well let’s just go check out the hours together when you leave. What do you mean you don’t have the check? THIS IS RIDICULOUS; I upheld my end of the bargain cleaning an inordinate amount of disgusting dirty dishing and bleaching things that were coming to life in my bathroom and you can’t uphold your end of the deal… are you kidding?!
This went on for awhile… I was having fun with it and was letting all my anger and frustration out on this poor soul who can’t have a very nice job dealing with students like me on a daily basis, periodically being interrupted with “I’m sorries” and “I’m embarassed”.
Then I went for the jugular… Sorry is not going to cut it, this needs to be resolved…my way. You provide a service to us here which has not been upheld….the litany continued.
The walk to the bank (after a long discussion with my idiot roommates about the water damage which basically had both sides resolving nothing very quickly) was…quiet, to say the least… I think I had made my point.
Sure enough it was open late enough.
I threatened to and returned to his office at four on the dot… This was the moment of truth best equated to one of the desert showdowns on a lonely main street in a one street town somewhere in Texas with blowing tumbleweed.
I sat down…what’s it gonna be….
Then…much to my delight…I saw it… the check…with my name on it… 500 Euro.
After a brief and very frigid goodbye I was out of his office like Charlie when he found the golden ticket in that little candy store. I kid you not, I ran to that freaking bank.
Cashing the check wasn’t even the most glorious part.
When I arrived in Italy, and I think I probably wrote to many of you, I was appalled by the new going fashion trend… shiny, metallic sneakers. However, after 6 months of a significant amount of peer pressure (namely the whole country) the tides had changed I had fallen in love with them…I made a point of saying they would be my “Custer’s last stand” purchase in Italy before going back to the US…. Namely to convince myself that I would actually do it.
Now you see, this rent check was a crucial part of my master scheme not only to by souvenirs for my family, but those. gold. shoes.
I had my eye on a specific pair for about three months but unfortunately my grossly large American sized foot couldn’t cram into the remaining size 9s they had.
Major. Bummer.
Fortunately, while meandering around, doing one of my final passeggiatas, I wandered into a sporting good store with a fair amount of shoes to choose from.
My eyes caught the gaudiest pair…Metallic gold with an Italian flag on the back, four stars on the front representing the four times they won the World Cup AND the dates of the world cup victory in the shoe.
They were supped up, they were incredibly Italian, and for 80 Euro they were so mine.
Thus the exchange experience was complete, I had fully immersed myself in the local culture not only by taking part in the time honored Italian sport of tearing a person to shreds verbally to get what you want…and enjoying it as you go, but also becoming well versed and even a practitioner in local dress customs.
You can now see me around town or in New York City sporting these fine sneakers and being incredibly proud of the incredulous stares and comments I get…. One girl who was 14 told me she had the same pair… another at the mall around here gave me props….For the most part they are a success and are a hit, especially when I tell this story but not matter… I find there is not more of a fitting way to leave Italy then sporting a pair of incredibly gaudy shoes. I love them (and as my father found out when he held them hostage as a retaliation for throwing him in the pool… they were more than just a pair of shoes…) they’ve really become the perfect summary of my exchange experience in Italy.
Check that one off on the list, it was time to go/come back to New York…
Here we go…
Ummm… to start off can I just mildly assert my frustration that in all the movies, nobody shows what happens AFTER the great adventure…. I mean, what the hell did Frodo do after throwing the ring back in Mount Doom; he couldn’t have been content going back to Hobbiton to finish out his freaking days (oh wait…. He did move on, bad example).. Ok Julia Roberts in Pretty Women; do they get up and go back to NY, do they live happily ever after. Movies seem to happily gloss over the day to day comings and goings and how people deal with life after a great adventure.
Now how do I deal (or not for that matter).
I guess we are going to have to step back in time a moment to almost a month and a half ago when I was getting ready to leave Italy… My last week there to be more precise. Needless to say, I wasn’t quite sitting still… In three days I had accomplished the seemingly impossible… an overnight in Roma with my friend Maria Paola, who’s family was gracious enough to host me for whatever brief period of time I was down there, then to Bologna for a quick overnight and to send off Rocco, then off to Milano that very same day after to meet my fathers’ cousins and show them around the city for a bit.
All this with the understanding that my landlord would be coming that Friday not only to inspect the apartment but also hand me my delicious 500 Euro security deposit check for which I had labored countless hours cleaning my idiot roommates dirty dishes and shit around the apartment trying to keep it in a presentable state…
Very much a Sisyphean task by the end, but I did make a valiant effort.
(I know it seems ridiculous that I’m glossing over the juicy details of an amazing overnight trip to Rome and whirlwind day to Bologna and Milan, but the nerve wracking stories are so much more interesting and fun to spell out; if you want to see/here about nice things, come stop by and I’ll bore you with photos…forever.)
I wasn’t in the best of moods coming to the end of my stay in Italy and hadn’t slept very well towards the end of the week, so as you will soon see, this added to the debacle.
So…. I walk into my landlords office neither bright eyed nor busy tailed that fateful Friday morning hoping that my weeks notice of departure and up and at’em attitude would see me with check in hand by later that morning.
Italy struck again.
Not only did the landlord forget about the inspection but he also forgot to even get authorization to issue the check….a painstaking procedure which would have taken all of two phone calls.
I was livid.
You see, we had been screwed over many times before with this guy, including but not limited to surprise pop ins to show the apartment, threats to use our deposits to hire a cleaning service to clean the apartment, and, my favorite, trying to blame the guys living upstairs for structural damage to the apartment during a torrential down pour.
Yeah, this guy was a piece. of. work.
After careful negotiation and a considerable amount of ripping into this poor guy like it was my job (armed not only with a command of the Italian language that even surprised me but also a New York sense of “don’t fuck me over”) I convinced him that stopping by would probably be the best idea seeing as I was to leave the city the day after. He miraculously was able to pencil me in between an appointment and overwhelmingly stressful two hour lunch break…and threatened that the apartment better be in order.
Oh it was. Not only was I equipped with Italian words and my rediscovered New York attitude, but also the ability to clean objects simply by staring at the in ire…. Needless to say it got done….sucka.
I returned to the apartment fuming, anyway. I guess the best image you can have is in your head at this point is one of those really pissed off sharks that keeps on swimming around the shark cage of two poor travel channel hosts wondering why they hadn’t been assigned the show Passport to Europe.
He arrives.
Much to his chagrin the parts of the apartment I was responsible for were impeccable. You see, this guy operates under the attitude not only of guilty until proven innocent, but also has the uncanny habit to spot tiny things out of place, which in an apartment where there nearly a constant turnover of students, happens to be just about everything. After foraying a series of ridiculous questions concerning the abysmal state of our 20 year old kitchen chairs and a mysterious shelf that appeared on my armoir, it was time for my rebuttal.
What about the check? The bank isn’t open later on, well let’s just go check out the hours together when you leave. What do you mean you don’t have the check? THIS IS RIDICULOUS; I upheld my end of the bargain cleaning an inordinate amount of disgusting dirty dishing and bleaching things that were coming to life in my bathroom and you can’t uphold your end of the deal… are you kidding?!
This went on for awhile… I was having fun with it and was letting all my anger and frustration out on this poor soul who can’t have a very nice job dealing with students like me on a daily basis, periodically being interrupted with “I’m sorries” and “I’m embarassed”.
Then I went for the jugular… Sorry is not going to cut it, this needs to be resolved…my way. You provide a service to us here which has not been upheld….the litany continued.
The walk to the bank (after a long discussion with my idiot roommates about the water damage which basically had both sides resolving nothing very quickly) was…quiet, to say the least… I think I had made my point.
Sure enough it was open late enough.
I threatened to and returned to his office at four on the dot… This was the moment of truth best equated to one of the desert showdowns on a lonely main street in a one street town somewhere in Texas with blowing tumbleweed.
I sat down…what’s it gonna be….
Then…much to my delight…I saw it… the check…with my name on it… 500 Euro.
After a brief and very frigid goodbye I was out of his office like Charlie when he found the golden ticket in that little candy store. I kid you not, I ran to that freaking bank.
Cashing the check wasn’t even the most glorious part.
When I arrived in Italy, and I think I probably wrote to many of you, I was appalled by the new going fashion trend… shiny, metallic sneakers. However, after 6 months of a significant amount of peer pressure (namely the whole country) the tides had changed I had fallen in love with them…I made a point of saying they would be my “Custer’s last stand” purchase in Italy before going back to the US…. Namely to convince myself that I would actually do it.
Now you see, this rent check was a crucial part of my master scheme not only to by souvenirs for my family, but those. gold. shoes.
I had my eye on a specific pair for about three months but unfortunately my grossly large American sized foot couldn’t cram into the remaining size 9s they had.
Major. Bummer.
Fortunately, while meandering around, doing one of my final passeggiatas, I wandered into a sporting good store with a fair amount of shoes to choose from.
My eyes caught the gaudiest pair…Metallic gold with an Italian flag on the back, four stars on the front representing the four times they won the World Cup AND the dates of the world cup victory in the shoe.
They were supped up, they were incredibly Italian, and for 80 Euro they were so mine.
Thus the exchange experience was complete, I had fully immersed myself in the local culture not only by taking part in the time honored Italian sport of tearing a person to shreds verbally to get what you want…and enjoying it as you go, but also becoming well versed and even a practitioner in local dress customs.
You can now see me around town or in New York City sporting these fine sneakers and being incredibly proud of the incredulous stares and comments I get…. One girl who was 14 told me she had the same pair… another at the mall around here gave me props….For the most part they are a success and are a hit, especially when I tell this story but not matter… I find there is not more of a fitting way to leave Italy then sporting a pair of incredibly gaudy shoes. I love them (and as my father found out when he held them hostage as a retaliation for throwing him in the pool… they were more than just a pair of shoes…) they’ve really become the perfect summary of my exchange experience in Italy.
Check that one off on the list, it was time to go/come back to New York…
Here we go…
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