Damien Galeone

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On Monday, I felt a bit sick and left work early, missing the second half of my office hours. Normally, my office hours are as deserted as an office building on Christmas morning. I usually spend the two hours doing paperwork or watching videos of animals who think they’re human.

So when I left a bit early Monday, I figured nobody would be wise. I tramped home, slipped mindfully into a matching sweatsuit and began reading on my couch with a cup of tea nearby and a cat irritating me with her tail.

There are some universal constants in the minutiae of academic life. For example, by the time you arrive at the Christmas party, the good juicy pork nibblers will be gone. The day you do something rather unconventional in class, is the day the class is interrupted by a high level administrator who just walked into the wrong room. Printers, projectors, and scanners all have brains, are vindictive, and hate people with advanced degrees.

But the biggest of all the truths is this: students don’t come to office hours, except for the day you can’t be at them, and then they show up in droves, with a desperate need to talk to you about something they could have easily taken care of by just coming to class or by applying 11 seconds of critical thinking.

So when I received an email from a student later that day, claiming that he had arrived at my office hours at 11:20 a.m. and was distressed to find that I was not there, I grumbled. Then I hoped that his arrival, frustration, and subsequent desperation had not been witnessed by someone responsible for my employment or for the successful transfer of cash to my account in return for services.

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Herbst Man Cave, Not Pictured: Security Guard (behind me)

It’s Thursday, my first full day in Łódź, Poland, and the weather outside is as frightful as a Sammy Cahn tune. It’s a day of rain, followed by a day of snow, and the roads outside are one big unflavored slushy.

Fortunately, the conference organizers arranged for a tour today of a few local indoor sights. I am walking around the Herbst Palace Museum, the preserved and renovated home of a 19^th century textile baron and his family. As the home has a study, a library, and a game room (the original “man cave”), for the first time in my life I am imagining myself as a 19^th century textile baron. There are eight conference participants on the tour.

The fact that I am on a tour of a textile baron’s home in Poland, when I would normally be in the middle of a three class day sends the playing hooky thrill up my spine. I am holding a museum brochure and enjoying social history. Life is so good.

OK, life would be better if I didn’t have to fart so badly.

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Like most devotees of the comfort zone, my off time and weekends are sacrosanct. If an entity or human touches, threatens to invade or misuse, or even addresses it directly in any way with which I am mildly uncomfortable, I will mentally build a muppet of their likeness and stab that fucker full of fork-tine sized holes.

So when the linguistics professor for whom I do research said “in December, you need to go to a conference in Poland…” I bit the inside of my cheek and mentally translated his measurements into original GI-Joe dimensions and grabbed my mental fork.

Outwardly, I said: “Oh OK.”

Academic conferences are a novel concept to me. This is partially due to the fact that the university has a peculiar way of encouraging/demanding that we take part in them right before they force us to fill out enough paperwork to build a tree fort. And then they quibble over and contest each Koruna like Ebenezer Scrooge in a spice market. I have been to three academic conferences in the last six years, and each time I have sworn never to go to one again.

Still, conferences have an attractive side. This side is primarily built of free food, free booze, and the allowance to say the phrase: “I am going to a conference in December.” It sounds so official and professional. Also, it is the only time I use the word “conference” without collocating it to Big East or National Football. At first I enjoy this novelty.

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There’s an impulse buy streak that runs through my family. My father is notorious for his impulse buy tendency, or he used to be anyway. He’d walk out of the house to get a doughnut and a cup of coffee and come home with a flat screen TV. Once, while shopping in Dick’s Sporting Goods for a birthday gift for my brother, he somehow came home with a dog.

While walking the streets in Naples years ago, my mother and I would look around to find that he was no longer with us. He’d then stumble out of a random tailor’s with three shirts and an ascot, or a hidden deli with a warehouse sized jar of olives. This happened so often that my mother’s bemoan “Where’s your father gone this time? Jesus Christ, if he buys one more tiny shirt….” was heard on several Neapolitan roads that week.

My mom could run the household on $10 a week. $5 if she only had to feed herself and the dog. She has the ability to stretch cash, get the most of her money, and logically deduce whether she truly needs something. If she were head of the Office of Management and Budget, the budget would be balanced and the whole country would be eating corned beef and cabbage.

I am not an impulse buy guy. Well, not anymore. Well, not usually. In college and in my early twenties, I simply had no concept of how money worked or what it was. Every week saw the purchase of another sweater I didn’t need, a book I knew I wouldn’t read, or a kitchen appliance I didn’t know how to use. I’d walk into my house wondering exactly how I’d ended up with an $80 beard trimming and cologne kit when I still hadn’t paid my electric bill. But, really, who needs lights and cooked food when you smell good and have a well-groomed goatee?

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For some, Thanksgiving is a day of turkey, cheese spreads, and football. For others, it’s a reminder of a dark romanticized past. For even more, it’s a day to commemorate that dark past with dioramas, macaroni art, and hand-traced turkeys.

For this expatriate, it is a day to wax nostalgic because I am 100% jealous of you people over there across the pond.

In our house, there was ubiquitous football. It wasn’t even a discussable point. The excitable tenors of the announcers became the music of the living room, as well as the murmur of my dad and uncles who spent a great deal of the day in front of that TV, talking about things I halfway understood. The occasional vulgarity crescendo. The kids were used as couriers, sent off to bring back a piece of pie, a bowl of olives, or, if the kid’s acumen was especially trusted, a beer.

There was a kitchen filled with appetizers, snacks, and pre-dinner goodies. It took me until the age of seventeen to realize that appetizers were the devil’s spawn. In the first few years of cognisant eating, I thought to myself: well, look at this! This is sort of like stumbling into chow heaven! And then I’d wander through, eating cubes of pumpernickel with as much spinach dip as I could balance on them, the semicircle abdomen of a cheddar cheese snowman on crackers, and all the pretzels and olives a boy can dream about.

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An Original Armstrong: Upside Down

If one were sitting on my couch or in my kitchen while I was writing or editing, they’d know the minute I hit a snag. First, there’d be some cursing. Always starts with the cursing. Then the reading aloud, as I verbally try to retrace the steps to exactly how I’d ended up in this rabbit hole of diction. And then I’d leave my office to find a household chore that needed immediate attention.

My Swiffer is used roughly ten times a morning when I’m writing, my dishes get done, my laundry gets put away. Sometimes I rework the problem or sentence as I work on my mindless chore, sometimes I just use the chore to clear my head, and sometimes I am just plain procrastinating.

Today when I hit a tricky sentence, my brain suggests that I get up to stretch an imagined, phantom ache in my right thigh. I walk into my living room and pick up my Swiffer, and maneuver it between the couch’s legs to grab up a cat-sized amount of cat hair, and some errant popcorn. That’s when I look up at the wall and notice the painting that has been hanging a foot or so above the couch for about twelve years. And it is just begging for attention.

Two birthdays ago, when I became a mere boy of forty, I received an original print from a good friend of mine who is an enviously talented artist. Since the household chores I am willing to undertake typically involve making something a little cleaner, making something a little less cluttered, or making something little to eat, this print has sat in the hallway, its virgin whiteness protected between two pieces of cardboard. And if there has ever been a time this print needs to replace the picture in this frame, then that time is now.

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Every morning I see the woman in a scarf. It’s either black or red; and once it was a tan scarf that looked like one I’d had as a kid that was unthreaded to death by a washing machine when I was 12.

Other than the scarf, the smoking woman dresses sort of like she’s about to take part in an equestrian show. She wears tall black boots, tight trousers, and a tan field jacket. She is always smoking a cigarette.

The woman in the scarf is my morning time gauge.

We pass each other three mornings a week, always somewhere between 7:15 and 7:20, when she is on her way from the metro to her office in the buildings near my flat and I am on the way to the metro to get across Prague. I have no idea where her commute starts, all I know is that I see her every morning. And depending on where I see her, I am either on time or very late.

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It was early October when I first realized that the fruit flies hadn’t gone with September. They usually arrive in the summer, finding little pockets of moisture in the dish rack or laying eggs in the cat’s food.

In summer, I try to keep them to a minimum. And by mid-September the cooler weather kills them off in droves.

But we had a serious Indian Summer this year, which lasted well into September. Thus, the fruit flies weren’t killed off. So in October I began the opening salvos of the battle for my kitchen counter. I left a few of my living room windows open one night in the hopes that the relative cool of an October night would kill them off.

In the morning, I opened the doors to the living room and kitchen, allowing the cat to head to her food bowls and her litter. We were both struck by the chill in the outer rooms. Even the cat wanted no parts of it and left for the warmer climes of my bed. I saw no fruit flies, so surmised that victory was mine. When I picked up the cat’s bowl, a dozen or so living commas drifted out of her food and held airborne patterns of dizzy squiggles.

They had not died, they had multiplied.

Damn

This would never have bothered me when I was younger. In my twenties, accomplishing domestic chores was secondary to any other task imaginable and fruit flies were a part of life. They were the perennially squatters of my flat. They lived in potatoes, they heavily guarded fruit that had gone off weeks before. My visitor’s drinks were littered with the corpses of their curious ranks.

‘Oh, it’s protein,’ I’d say, ‘on the house.’

But things change, and so do people. And now, the army of fruit flies living in my kitchen were telling me that I was not doing a good job on a domestic level. They are pests. I was so poor at keeping house, that I had invited pests into it. And that couldn’t be good.

They had to be destroyed. And so began a campaign against them. It started with the standby: a jar of red wine topped with a hole-filled saran wrap lid. It did nothing. I hadn’t killed them, I got the little bastards drunk.

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