the habit of being

I watch a neighborlady in a $3.99 housewife smock from the dollar store, hosing off her air conditioner on the sidewalk, husband standing by. The heat wave is over. No more $200 electric bills. An American flag flaps. My bedroom door slams on its own. The breeze makes my cell phone fuzzy, and my mother says “Step away from the window.”

“Well, if you’re going to read a book about a retard,” she says, “you should just read The Sound and the Fury.” It’s too hard, of course, for my little brother, for whom I’d recommended The Curious Incident… He has to read a novel for school, and we’re appalled but not surprised that his teacher gave him Left Behind. Half the girls in my high school English reported on one book or another from that series when the dreaded Oral Presentation came round. Me? Atlas Shrugged. “My little heretic,” laughs Mom. We settle on The Catcher in the Rye for Wayne.

Watching the sunrise on ephedrine, my fingers tremble. Watching The Decalogue on Tootsie rolls, my mouth sweats. I take my camera out looking for things that look like photographs to take pictures of.

At the museum, I’d rather look at the people looking at the art.

These pills are big and purple and they make me feel like I’m going to have a heart attack or a panic attack any second. Apparently a lot of people have had heart attacks, and that’s why it’s illegal. I probably would’ve thrown away the bottle a long time ago if it hadn’t been for the ban. It’s not like I think they will actually work. Taking pills that make you feel sick is nice, because then you feel justified in taking more pills. Faking an addiction you don’t actually have: on the edge, over the edge, off the deep-end.

A better approach to losing weight without working out. For breakfast, lunch, and dinner: EAT COFFEE.

Little Asian girls with pigtails are the cutest thing. Saw one in a blue cotton dress with a balloon in the DMV, where I waited for five hours for the ID with my misspelled name. Now they are springing up everywhere.

I was in Soho, taking pictures of graffiti and windows, two of the most chickenshit things to take pictures of that there are, when I decided I would Buy Something, even though I don’t have any money on account of the new iBook that I can’t play the finale of Six Feet Under on. I hadn’t bought new clothes since I moved here. So a window saying Sample Sale emerged with an arrow, which I followed to a door. Somehow I tried on and bought a gray dress that was a size or two too large for me. Maybe the extra space in the dress was filled up by how huge I feel, but in any case it is hideous. It looks like the silk version of the $3.99 housewife smock, only I paid a lot more for it, only to ball it up and toss it up on the top shelf of my closet, disgusted.

I went to the Photography section at the bookstore to look at The Ballad of Sexual Dependency and Closer, which are both soft and losing hold of their bindings thanks to people like me and our pilgrimages. We sit cross-legged on the industrial carpet in the middle of the aisle, not caring if we’re blocking people as we flip through, slowly. Only once, then put it back. They’re in such bad shapes, these books, that no one would ever actually purchase them, which is good because I’ll know where they are when I need them, and actually having them at home might just wear them out anyway.

“Vous êtes trés jolie, mademoiselle,” says the old man walking past me on St-Denis. Somehow this is not nearly as creepy as the English equivalent. Somehow it isn’t creepy at all. I smile at him. I’d never do that in New York.

I’m sitting on a bench eating sushi. I made it through a whole sentence in French before the woman at the register switched to English on me. I’m slightly proud.. this is a step up from my first day in Montréal, during which I didn’t venture further than a “bonjour!” or a “oui!”

The hostel is made of indoor treehouses. The outdoor ones are still being constructed day by day. Men use electric saws in the courtyard, and we all get up early, make coffee, smear jelly on croissants and bagels. I’ve met people from Switzerland, China, Germany, France, Manitoba, North Carolina, England, Ireland, Scotland, Sweden, and Italy so far. I’m better at remembering the countries than the names.

Compared to New York, Old Montréal seems deserted. Everyone here is a tourist; none of us can give each other directions.

Carmen and Diane are from Winnipeg, working secretarial jobs in the same place they were born. They’ve been friends for a decade, and they are the loudest people I’ve met. Eric, from Australia, said he though it would be the Americans who would be loud, but that we are some of the quietest people here. Everyone I tell that I’m from the States asks me what I think of Bush, and I feel like it’s necessary to explain that We’re Not All Like That. Carmen and Diane went off to Québec City with Ryan from North Carolina in a rented car. I think Diane and Ryan are sleeping together.

Some people here have been travelling for months. 17 countries in 30 days, et cetera. Desert islands, yellow fever vaccinations, beautiful motel rooms for $4 US, entire years off work. They smile about my hitch-hiking trip, but none of them have done that, exactly. None of them have begged or slept in the street.

There are only two other girls travelling alone. One is a teacher from Germany on her summer break, seeing all the big cities in Canada. One is a bartender from Fire Island. Her name is Laura, she’s 19, and she is a former ballet dancer, always doing tricks and showing off. Every photo op prompts a split or a cardwheel or a handstand. Somehow it is common knowledge in the hostel that she is a virgin because the man she fell in love with said no, and that he said no beause didn’t love her back. It is also known that she takes Effexor.

Laura and I walked around the Montréal casino, and saw an old lady win $500 on her first quarter in the slot machine. We congratulated her, and she started putting her winnings back through the slot by the handful. Laura wouldn’t shut up about how she’d wanted the woman to save it, about how depressing it all was. A sleazy-looking man at the roulette table asked her what her number was, and she didn’t understand, so he shouted in English, and said he’d give her $25 if it came up. She said 29, and then he asked me and I said 15. They didn’t come up, and then her necklace broke and my shirt came untied and she kept saying the man was Satan. That night was her last night, and she hooked up with a guy who spoke broken English, got vomiting drunk, and lost one of her Chinese slippers.

The next day, Laura’s boy tapped me on the head with a travel guide, and came up behind me while I was reading a borrowed copy of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and tapped my shoulder and made me jump. I ignored it. The boy who let me borrow the book also cooked me pasta and washed my dishes two nights in a row. He wants me to show him around the Bronx when he’s in New York, even though I keep explaining that I don’t know anything about the Bronx.

I got the Biosphere and the Biodôme confused, and made a group of five people cough up money to see a “water museum” by promising penguins that weren’t there. I saw the penguins myself the next day.

When Uncle Lane gave her a bushel for free, my mother’s first thought was “there ought to be some way to get drunk off all these peaches.” That’s how Sharon and Kathy’s devastating les peaches anodynes got started, and she’s reviving them for my visit home. Apparently she and Kathy spent a long time perfecting the recipe, but never wrote it down. One important factor is that the peaches be ripe, so she’s got them on the windowsill, and maybe by Sunday. They were so good that she and Kathy had to not tell people about them. They were so popular there’d be four blenders going at once. Kathy is the one from the photos who got her period in my mom’s favorite jeans. Or else she got her period in her own favorite jeans and mom convinced her it was worth hand-washing them for a date, on account of how skinny they made her. Something about blood and demin. Anyway. In addition to the peaches, she’s also got the blackberries-to-die-for, the squash-for-days, greenbeans, and watermelon. She already went to the very-best-cookies, homemade butter, and cream farmers market on Monday. She’s got new ingredients for the pimento cheese, which she’s roasting her own peppers for instead of buying the pimentos in a jar.