Teeth, Love, and Growing Up

Hey EN502,  The other day at a party, I referred to my job as a “power trip.” I do not think many people would consider a bookseller as a power hungry position, but I do not think most people are readers. I get to order books. I get to make staff picks. I get to choose and wrap blind dates with books. For a kid who grew up enamored with bookstores, these tasks thrill me. I am curating other reader’s experiences.  In addition to books, our shop also sells a myriad of specialty items the young people are obsessed with. We sell more Jelly Cats and Sonny Angels than books, but at least these items keep the store open and the books on the shelves. I was not familiar with Sonny Angels, or the intensity of Sonny Angel obsession until a Saturday when we got fifteen calls during an eight hour shift inquiring if we sold the figurines. The Jelly Cats are cute though. I gave my boyfriend a vaguely stoned-looking stuffed cat from the shop and it has become the light of our lives.  I a...

     On my most recent field day, my crew lead Martha and I drove to Kelly Warm Springs to kill bullfrog eggs.      Bullfrogs are an invasive species known to be very large, mobile, and disruptive of natural ecosystems (they eat anything they can swallow, even birds). The length of a tadpole can span from my wrist to my fingertips.      Kelly Warm Springs is a small, naturally occurring spring at the southeastern edge of the park that feeds into the Snake River. Steam curled across its surface from the cool early morning as we pulled into a small dirt parking lot across from it to unload our gear. My field equipment: 1. Waders 2. Sun shirt 3. Mesh butterfly net 4. Sunglasses      Armed to the teeth (and ogled by several curious tourists), Martha and I pushed through the grass and began making our way around the pond before wading into the water.      The water is crystal clear, and not as warm as I’d th...

     For reasons it would be too tedious to explain, this summer I find myself in house-hopping hell. Two weeks ago, it was an Airbnb in Boston. Last week, my aunt’s sofa in LA. This month, my freshman cousin’s two-bedroom apartment near Prudential while he's away, which I’m currently sharing with a family of three (his roommate's parents are in town). Then his lease is up at the end of June, so after that, it’s a roulette of couch surfing for the rest of the summer, everywhere from LA to New York to Allston, while I scramble to find a lease for September and all while starting a new job.      All this to say I’ve suddenly gained a lot of experience in figuring out the things I need to live, and the things I can live without (at least for the interim). I’m constantly experimenting with how much of myself I can put somewhere, weighing the realities of a looming expiration date and being in someone else’s home with my desire to briefly have a space I can call...

 Dear EN502, Holy Moly--- last month was a big one. I think I knew that, subconsciously at least, May was going to be a real battle when it began with rain. I'm not particularly superstitious. I am not afraid of 13th floors and salt has long gone un-thrown over my shoulder but, for it all, I truly believe that I received some sort of omen as I sat sipping coffee on the morning of May the first because my kitchen used to look out, through a window, over Commonwealth Avenue, and, on that gray morning, I sat watching mist rise and dark clouds hang low, like impossible lace, between the sky-scrapers and office buildings and luxury condominiums. Honestly, that might have happened on May 2nd but eh-- who remembers! An omen is an omen, I say.  Weak divination aside, I think May was a particularly difficult month because people freak out when big things end. College is no exception. As such, in our stress and our frustration, some of us start throwing shit out (I am us, in this instan...

     We were hiking back to the Work Truck from our field site when my crewmate Megan briefly introduced me to everyone I'd be working with this summer.      "…and Bella is the baby of the crew, she's twenty-three," Megan told me. Then she asked, "How old are you?"      I said I was twenty-one, to which she replied, "Oh! So, you’re the baby now."      And she was right – not only am I the baby of the crew, but I also feel like a baby in the adult world – I’ve never felt so young and inexperienced. This past week on the job has felt like one big “bring your kid to work day.”     On Wednesday in the field, our roles were divided as such: Vanna unlocked the technology box and downloaded data onto the tablet, Megan and Martha made repairs and adjustments to the creek setup, and I sat at the edge of the creek and turned over rocks to look for bugs until we moved on to the next site (one time, while Martha was wrestling wit...

Throughout second semester, when people asked what city---or even which coast---I was going to be living in after graduation, I never had an answer. My plans had shifted when I decided to take a gap year to apply to law school. Now, I wasn't sure whether to pursue a full-time job so I could have "solid post-grad plans" or move back home to study for the LSAT full-time over the summer.  If I went home, I'd be living in suburban San Diego, a major shift from what I had known to be an uninterrupted, East Coast city life for the past two years. If I pursued a job, I could stay in Boston and claw back some of that time COVID had stolen from me. Or, I could apply to jobs in any number of cities, trying them each on for size. All of the possibilities made my head hurt, and I honestly spent most of second semester avoiding thinking about any of it. One thing I did know, though, was that I had a dentist appointment the day after I was going to fly back to San Diego. That had b...