Three Shows in York and a new Black Keys Album

by Katie Dempsey

originally published in The Earl Magazine, March 2012

I tend to hibernate in the winter. From the first temperature drop in November to the first thaw in April, my natural inclination is to spend all my free time curled up on my couch with fifty blankets, watching Netflix until my legs cramp up from lack of use.

The move from five years of living in Pittsburgh back to Central Pennsylvania has only made it worse. Pittsburgh is filled with a lot of tall buildings protecting its residents from wind chill. Not so much around here. It’s even worse that I work in an un-insulated trailer outside a factory on the top of a giant hill and have to walk 200 yards and up a loading ramp to get into the building every time I have to use the bathroom.

But despite all these hardships, I did manage to make it out to see three shows in York during this winter season. The first, at the end of December, was at a bar called Maewyn’s, located right on North George Street on the edge of downtown York City. Maewyn’s is a traditional Irish bar with high ceilings, beautiful wood paneling and a generally warm, cozy atmosphere. It’s kind of a classy bar, the kind where you can go there dressed up and not feel overdressed but still go in ripped jeans and not feel like a total slob.

As a venue, Maewyn’s is not ideal—the bands were kind of stuffed into a small side room so about 75% of the bar patrons couldn’t even see them. If you wanted to physically be able to see the musicians, you had to crowd into a very small area right between the side room and the bar.

But crowd we did, because the headlining act was phenomenal. Garrahan’s Ghost is a Pogues-esque traditional-Irish new-folk seven-piece band comprised of two guitars, drums, a fiddle, a mandolin, a harmonica and an accordian player (the accordian player was, unfortunately, not present that evening, and I learned he is currently deployed in Afganistan).

Garrahan’s Ghost put on a great show. The bar was packed, and the crowd loved it—surrounding the band, people nodded along with the music, smiling and stomping their feet and clapping their hands and singing along. The band’s sound was great and the songs infectiously happy, the kind of songs you will find yourself humming the next day (or week). This was a fun show, and it definitely made me forget my winter blues for a night.

Then after a month of solid hibernation (made considerably more dreamlike by watching, in succession, all of the fourth season of Venture Bros, both seasons of The Mighty Boosh and the first season of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks), I broke out of my winter coccoon on the first weekend in February to see two bands at two different bars in York.

The Depot is a bar/venue not far from York College, and it’s kind of the complete opposite of Maewyn’s.

You could affectionately call it a “dive”, I guess--it’s got that rubbed-raw from overuse, rock’n’roll, smoke-filled broken-down griminess that those of us with punk-rock inclinations feel a sort of pride for, like showing off that bruise you got from being caught up in a bar-scuffle that actually had nothing to do with you. Needless to say, I felt right at home at the Depot, and it was definitely well suited to be a music venue, with a big room extending back from the bar area so everyone could see the band, even patrons sitting at the bar.

We caught the second-to-last band playing at this show before calling it a night (working first shift and getting up at 6am makes me pretty sapped of energy by as early as midnight on Friday nights). Now, I’m not generally a fan of metal (excepting the kind in Brendan Small’s Metalocalypse and..Primus, I guess? If you could call them metal?) but Sour Mash Survival had me at their mic check, where they previewed their impressive vocal talents by banshee-screaming the word “CHECK CHECK” into their microphones for what seemed like twenty minutes.

But I can appreciate any genre of music live if its performed well, and I’d say that Sour Mash Survival, a Baltimore-based band, performed very well. Despite the call-and-answer guttural screaming and roaring of their songs they were very polite and cheerful, joking around with each other and the audience and just generally having a good time. I can definitely appreciate and respect performers who seem to genuinely enjoy performing, and this was definitely the case with SMS. It also doesn’t seem to be the case with many of the other local metal bands I’ve ever seen (who definitely didn’t have the talent to warrant any kind of surly, anti-social attitude).

The Saturday after the Depot I went to the First Capital Dispensing Company, or First Cap, which is right on the edge of York City proper, next to the river. It’s a pretty random looking place to have a bar, just on the corner of a dark residential street. But upon entering, you’re transported into a very rustic-feeling, civil-war-era looking room with low, wood-beam-exposed ceilings and an old, solid feel to the walls. It’s very small and cozy, and to my shock, we walked in right in front of the band that was playing, a sort of jazz-funk rock’n’roll jam-band called Redeye.

Redeye played great background bar music. Their sound was tight and disciplined with a great funk swing (the trumpet player, who kept his instrument politely muted, was especially exceptional, and the skill of the bass player also very noteworthy). It was the kind of music that makes you drift out of your conversations to just tilt your head back and relax and listen, which I did pretty much the whole time.

Finally, the other thing keeping the winter blues away is the fact that I finally shelled out the cash and downloaded The Black Keys latest album El Camino. What can I say about El Camino expect WOW. I love the Black Keys, especially their 2010 album Brothers, and I was very pleased to hear that El Camino was a natural continuation from the sounds and themes they took on in Brothers.

The Black Keys are the sort of band that can attract a wide variety of fans. When I lifeguarded at an indoor college pool last summer, our patrons ranged from teenagers attending a camp to take college-level classes, to college athletes, to retired faculty members, to a day-camp of kids aged 4-10. We were in charge of the music to be played to the pool, I struggled to decide on what, out of all the strange and eclectic music on my iPod, could possibly be background music to appeal to (and not offend) all the different types of people at our pool.

The Black Keys were the perfect solution. I lost track of the amount of pool patrons who would walk up to me and ask what was this awesome music playing over the speakers.

The Black Keys have a great sound, and have over the years refined and changed it while still maintaining the core personality of their music. They’re bluesy, Hendrix-y rock’n’roll with an early 70s rock’n’roll feel to it while still sounding fresh, modern, and innovative. The production quality is awesome, and they play with sounds in a way that is evocative of the tinny sounds of old, damaged blues records combined with the new multi-layered “good fuzz” distortion of new production technology. Black Keys sound like if a bunch of sentient robots from the year 3,000 traveled through time while listening to French alternative band Phoenix, and crashed onto the stage of a Jimi Hendrix concert and fused with the music without missing a beat.

El Camino burns the whole way through like a good fire, crackling and sparking with energy. Heavy bass-thumps from the drum, group choruses, sweet bass-lines, raging guitars, the album has all the elements of good rock’n’roll without ever being too showy or over-the-top. You can listen to it and sing along and bob your head, or you can play it in the background while you concentrate on something else. You ever watch one of those concert cellists or violists play their instruments like it’s the easiest thing in the world, like they’re just kind of shrugging this music out? That’s what this album feels like. And it feels damn good.*

Garrahan’s Ghost can be found at http://www.reverbnation.com/garrahansghost

Sour Mash Survival can be found at http://www.reverbnation.com/sourmashsurvival

Redeye can be found at http://www.myspace.com/gustavoaguirrejr

El Camino is available on iTunes.

 

Katie Dempsey

Udder Despair: Memoirs of a Lactose Psychosis

The movie Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: Secret of the Ooze starts with a shot of the New York City skyline at night. The camera pans in a little then cuts to the thick of night-life traffic in Brooklyn and stops to focus in on two men. These men are not characters in this movie. They serve one purpose--to introduce the theme of the movie.They are both chowing down on two impossibly huge, delicious-looking, mozzarella-dripping, grease-slathered slices of New York City's finest pizza.

The music heats up. A man and woman in fancy clothes kiss in front of a fountain, then reach down and grab their respective slices of pizza. A cabdriver sits parked between shifts and devours a slice out his open car door window. A crowd of pedestrians start to cross the street at a walk signal, but one man is delayed because he's trying to eat the dripping mozzarella cheese off the end of his slice of pizza.

By the time the title credits are over and we reach the workplace of one of the protagonists of the movie, a pizza delivery boy employed by one Roy's Pizza, I have to grab the remote, hit the stop button, throw the remote at the TV in anger, and curl up on the couch in the dark pizza-less silence of the living room sobbing and wondering where and why my life went so horribly wrong.

I was never "officially" diagnosed as lactose intolerant. I used to be normal. I was seventeen when I started to feel nauseous after drinking milk. It was at this point that my lactose-intolerant mother revealed to me this unfortunate truth--

"You know, I'm pretty sure lactose intolerance can be hereditary," she said, glancing at the box of X-tra Super Cheesy Cheez-Its that I had grasped in my hands at the time. "And actually, it was at around your age that I started to not be able to drink milk too. Try cutting all dairy products out of your diet, and see if you stop getting sick."

So I followed her advice and started reading ingredients and stopped eating pizza for lunch at my high school cafeteria. At this time I did not grasp the ramifications of this little "experiment," although they were probably lurking in the back of my mind and I only pushed them aside to retain my sanity.

When I was younger, I didn't really notice that my mother was different. Every time we went out to eat at any restaurant that was not Asian, she glumly studied the menu, eventually picked out the least offensive item, and sternly informed our waitress to tell the cooks to prepare it with "no dairy products."

"No milk, no butter, no cheese, no sour cream, anything like that," she said. As I grew older, this routine became more and more embarrassing for me to watch. About 90 percent of waitresses clearly had no experience with this particular food request. Their reactions alternated between extreme lack of interest to painfully confused attempts to understand what exactly a dairy product was. "Well...there's mayonnaise in it..." was common, after which my mom would reassure them that mayonnaise was fine, as it is made out of whipped eggs and not cow's milk.

Other waitresses, suffering from overwork and frequent criticisms from angry customers, seemed to assume that my mom was just being a picky eater to make their lives more difficult, and would angrily pretend to write down all these dietary restrictions while nodding vigorously and saying 'uh huh uh huh yeah sure,' a sure-fire way of telling ahead of time that my mom's food would arrive covered with cheese.

So I should have been recalling these times and awaiting the results of this makeshift diagnosis with all the grimness and solemnity of a prisoner facing execution by firing squad. Teenagers, however, by nature, are completely unable to envision events taking place any time after the upcoming weekend, and I foolishly thought 'The Dairy Experiment' was merely a fun distraction from the tedium of eleventh-grade existence. But sure enough, at the end of a week of dairy-free eating, my digestive problems had started to taper off. My mother encouraged me to go one more week, and by that time, I was feeling completely better, at which time the following scene occurred:

"I'm not sick anymore!" I announced happily to my mom.

"Great!" she said. "You must be lactose intolerant!"

"Oh," I said, slightly less elated. "Well then."

"It's not so bad," she backtracked, unconvincingly. "Some people take pills that help," she offered.

"Why don't you take them?" I asked.

"I could never get them to work," she said.

"Oh," I said. "Does that they might not work for me either?"

"Maybe," she said.

We both lapsed into silence. I eyed our food pantry, which currently housed a family-sized bag of Cheese Dorritos. I could stand up, walk over there, and have the bag in my hands within seconds. It was so close and yet completely out of my grasp. Forever.

My dad and younger brother chose this somber moment to arrive home, having just returned from my brother's basketball game.

"Hi, family!" my brother shouted, discarding his tote bag on the kitchen floor. He opened the fridge and pulled out a package of string cheese, devouring it in three bites. I felt my eyes start to get misty as my fingers began to twitch involuntarily.

"We're both starving," said my dad. "We thought for dinner we'd order some pizza, Katie, what kind do you want?"

I didn't answer, just slowly dropped my head down onto the kitchen table in defeat.

"What's wrong with her?" I heard my brother ask.

It was the beginning of the end.

Chapter One: Adapting to being Non-Adaptive: My Struggle

At first it was almost fun. As an insecure, socially awkward teenager, I actually started out relishing this one genetic oddity that made me 'unique,' giving me a reliable conversation piece.

Person: Want some cheese doodles?

Me: Ohh, I'd love some--but I can't. I'm lactose intolerant.

Person: Lactose intolerant?

Me: Yeah I can't have any milk products, they make me sick.

Person: Oh!

(pause)

Person: Were you always like that?

Me: No, it just happened recently...

Person: Really?

Me: Yeah. It sucks.

Person: That's really weird.

Me: No, it happens...to people...

There was also quite often a subsection to this conversation in which the person asked "makes you sick how?" As eager as I was to have a talking point, this was the part where I hastily changed the subject. Still, for a while, piquing the interest of everyone who offered me cheese was fun, letting me recount the strange tale of contracting this odd disease and my daily struggle to deal with it, but after a while it began to wear on me. My lactose intolerance conversations soon gave way to thousands of smaller conversational interactions such as the following:

Longtime Friend: Hey Katie, you want some (food with obvious milk component)?

Me: (massive sigh) I can't. Lactose intolerant. Remember?

Longtime Friend: Oh yeah. I keep forgetting. Sorry.  (devours forbidden food item in front of me with a suspicious amount of satisfaction/gusto)

When I began my freshman year of college at the University of Pittsburgh in 2005, the problem of my lactose intolerance escalated until it was almost unbearable. Since my mother was lactose intolerant too, my dad (the cook in the family) had always prepared delicious home-cooked dishes that had no need for any milk products, or else he substituted soy milk in recipes that called for milk. In college, my nutritional requirements became my own responsibility. And by that I mean I had a dorm room equipped with only a microwave, and a campus dining meal plan.

Back in 2005, The University of Pittsburgh, although boasting of a culturally diverse student population of over 20,000 people, offered in its campus dining halls and eateries a depressingly bland selection of 'American' dishes. If I've learned anything about American food after becoming lactose intolerant, it's that the key ingredient to most of the meals is cheese of some kind. (Butter is a close second.) The biggest dining hall on campus, Market Central, was buffet-style: meaning the cheese-infused dishes were pre-prepared. Needless to say, I began to starve to death.

When I first starting trying to figure out the system and landscape of life at Pitt, I found that upperclassmen would often dispense their hard-earned peals of knowledge to the scores of helpless and confused young freshmen. Once, an older classmate gave me one such would-be valuable piece of advice. Since Pitt was so huge, he said, if you did a thorough-enough job of researching the various university-sponsored events, lectures, information sessions, and the whole host of organized get-togethers at this college, you could probably score a free meal at one of these events every day.

On one occasion, the blood drive in the student union was being catered by Qdoba, a chain of tex-mex cuisine. I ambled in and saw that, to my complete shock, it was an actual buffet of make your own tacos, cheese in separate bowls to be spooned on at your own discretion. I immediately signed up for a walk-in appointment to give blood. I waited for an hour and a half for them to take a single drop sample from my arm and tell me that my iron was too low to donate. At that point I had devoured about two dozen free soft-shell chicken tacos and three plates full of chips and guacamole, so I was perfectly happy to leave with merely a full stomach, minus the heavenly rewards of helping others.

That event, unfortunately, was an outlier. Pretty much every time the university organized an event for undergraduates they got a pizza place to cater it, bringing in dozens upon dozens of giant boxes of cheese and pepperoni pizzas to be annihilated by the countless students attending. If the event was smaller or fancier, it would be hoagie type sandwiches with cheese, or maybe an assortment of fancy cheeses that you could eat on toothpicks. My plan of eating free food on campus was failed.

And then, one day, astonishingly, after years of thinking I was a freak, a rarity, a stranger in a strange land, I met another of my kind. I don't remember her name, or where I met her, but I do remember the conversation, for you do not easily forget such life-altering advice.

"Don't you take the pills? The lactaid pills?" she asked.

"I tried once," I said. In fact, I had tried several times. "I did what it said on the bottle, I took two with the first bite of food containing dairy. But I still got sick. So I figured they didn't work."

"You only took two?" she asked. "God, you have to take way more than two."

I was confused. The bottle of Lactaid Lactase Enzyme specifically said two pills at a time, maximum.

"I take like five," she said. "Do you take the Fast-Act or Ultra-Strength?"

I had only tried regular.

"Try taking like five of the Fast-Act or Ultra ones," she said. And then, as if she was acting merely as a messenger from the gods on Mount Olympus, she was gone.

Chapter Two: It's Never That Easy

It seemed simple, failsafe. Carry the pills around all the time, read the ingredients, take the pills if there's a milk product. I thought all my problems were solved. I was wrong.

I have never been a particularly organized person. My classmates in high school and college carried agendas and day planners to keep track of everything they had to do and everywhere they had to go. I personally was more inclined to just go on memory, writing important numbers and dates on random scraps of paper that I would put someplace incomprehensible and promptly forget about. So developing some sort of system for always having at least five lactaid pills on me at all times was proving to be nothing short of impossible.

College is a nomadic lifestyle, especially at Pitt; with no cars, we load up our backpacks and messenger bags with whatever we need for classes that day, returning when we could to our dorm rooms to exchange them for other textbooks,  equally if not more heavy than the previous load. Wallet, keys, cellphone, notebook, folders, textbooks, pencils.

As a person habitually suffering from a gross lack of organization, I grabbed random notebooks in my room with free space and any given notebook could have any combination of notes from whichever class I decided to take notes in that day. I had two folders. All my worksheets and handouts from all my classes were dispersed amongst both the folders. Which handout went in which folder was anybody's guess.

So the fact that I was having immense problems remembering to take my lactaid pills with me wherever I went, and buying new bottles when I ran out, and switching my current bottle between my messenger bag (for times when I had class and needed to carry books) and my purse (for all the other times) on the chance that I might come across some free pizza on that day, was something I probably should have anticipated.

Instead of making conscious efforts to change everything about my chaotic methods of living in order to be able to keep track of one damn bottle of pills (actually, I was usually in possession of several at a time) so I could eat something with lactose in it, I reverted back to my earlier tactic of ingredient-list-reading milk-product avoidance.

Also, I was starting to become self-righteously principled about the whole thing. Although many a teen drama or after-school special has often followed the tale of a young person who fought for their constitutional rights by protesting an unfair teacher, professor, or other authority figure, emerging in the end a triumphant figure who fought a hard-earned moral battle and won, college taught me that in order to be successful in our society a person is required to read the instructions, follow the directions, listen to authority figures, accept things the way they are, and not question anything, no matter how "unfair" it may initially seem.

It took me awhile to figure this out. If a professor was running a class in a manner that I thought was unfair or poorly organized to the detriment of the students, I would sit in the back of the classroom glaring at the professor for a few weeks, stop doing the homework, and then go to Thackery Hall and withdraw from the class. Occasionally I'd actually try to register a complaint, only finding myself hopelessly caught in the tangled web that is university bureaucracy.

Consequently, the more long ingredient lists I read and the more pre-packaged products that had milk or whey or just plain lactose seemingly randomly thrown in, the angrier I got at the whole situation and the more stubbornly I resisted it. Why should I have to buy these stupid pills when no one else I know has to, why should I have to try to remember to take them, and constantly be trying to figure out the minimum amount of pills I could take for every form or amount or gradation of a milk product? Why do the manufacturers have to put whey-solids in cajun chex mix, anyway?

If I was with a group of people and they wanted to go out to eat, and suggested a pizza place or any American restaurant, I would get irrationally angry at them. "But I can't eat anything there!" I would exclaim. "Why not Chinese food, or that Thai place?" No, everyone wanted pizza. Well, fine. I'm leaving. Have fun eating your goddamn important pizza. Or someone would eat a chocolate bar in front of me. "I despise you," I would say to them, making them look up at me with wide, hurt eyes and chocolate-smeared lips. "You have no idea how lucky you are, do you. Do you?!"

I started noticing all the American Dairy Association advertisements on billboards and on television. "Drink milk!" they proclaimed "It's good for you and makes your bones strong!"

"Drink milk and lose weight!" the television shouted at me cheerily. "Milk is healthy and wonderful!"

"Fuck you, American Dairy Association!" I shouted back, startling my roommate into dropping her microwaved bowl of Kraft macaroni and cheese onto the floor.

I was raging against the machine, the milk-machine, the cheese and dairy obsessed culture of America. Just when I thought I was at the breaking point, when I couldn't take it anymore and was on the brink of loading a shotgun and going on a roadtrip across America gunning down cows and blowing up dairy farms, a miracle occurred. It was called Veganism.

Chapter Four: A Hero

My last semester at Pitt was a strange one. My friends had graduated the previous spring, but I, having taken a semester off a few years back, still needed 20 more credits to graduate. I had a scholarship that would expire at the end of the year.

Up until this point, winter of 2009, my transcript at Pitt so far probably looked kind of sketchy if one were to view it in semester increments. Sure, there were a good amount of As and Bs, in some very interesting classes. There were also frequent croppings of W's, one G, and several F's. Some C's rounded it out. No Ds.

According to Pitt, the W stands for Withdraw, and the G for incomplete. I don't have to explain the official meanings of the grades A through F, but in my case, the F stands for Fuck This Class-I'm Leaving.

And the W stood for Why The Fuck Should I Even Care About This Shit.

The A stood for Actually This Professor Is Pretty Cool and I Enjoy Learning This Material.

The B stood for Barely Making an Effort but Fortunately I'm Pretty Smart and Can Get a Decent Grade In This Subject Without Studying.

The C stood for Could Probably Get an A If I Applied Myself But Why Bother If I Can Coast And Still Get a C.

The D stood for Don't Worry, If I Actually Study A Little And Get a B on The Final Paper I Think Can Manage To Pull This Grade Up To A Low C.

Stubborn, that's what I was. I didn't have a lot of what the kids call "street smarts" most of my tenure in college, but one thing I could do was quickly and effortlessly understand and explain theories and concepts in any liberal arts area of study-- history, psychology, sociology, literature, social change, politics, women's studies, anthropology etc. The other thing I could do was write in a way that effectively demonstrated that I really did understand these theories and concepts and that I was an intelligent person.

Growing up, I was a painfully shy, awkward kid, terrible at making or having friends. The art of small-talk and casual conversation was lost on me, and the awkward silences in conversations with me left most adults or children walking away thinking I was rude, or just plain weird. I sensed that people felt uncomfortable around me, but I didn't quite know why, so I started avoiding people. I spent most of my youth alone in my backyard or in my house, reading books.

Reading books shaped my understanding of the world. While most kids my age were playing with their friends, I was riding the Dawn Treader across the seas of Narnia, teleporting with Meg and Charles Wallace Murry to a distant dystopian planet ruled by a pulsing giant disembodied brain, riding a broomstick around the Quiddich field at Hogwarts for the first time, standing with a boy named Jonas as he anxiously awaited his career assignment from the Council of Elders, confused and shocked with him as he learns he will be the first Receiver of Memory in decades.

I followed a spunky girl name Ella with a gift for learning the languages of elves and ogres, as she escaped from a horrid finishing school because a fairy's curse that she always obey orders, and watched a girl named Hannah mysteriously time-travel from her parent's home in present-day New York City to a the body of a girl just like her who lived in a small village in Germany in the year 1939, only to find herself, with her uncle and aunt, on a train to Auschwitz.

My brain shaped itself around these worlds of ideas and themes, of adventures, conflicts, archetypes, resolution, history lessons, science lessons, all in the form of story. This type of childhood certainly made my ability to understand abstract ideas and concepts better than most, and it certainly gave me a better understanding of the written word than in those who spent less time reading. I would say it made my vocabulary fantastic, and I can speak and write very eloquently if I want to as a result of the thousands upon thousands of books I've read in my life. But the one thing hiding in this world of books gave me that was a curse rather than a blessing was a rather distorted sense of the way things should be.

The thing about stories, the reason we like them so much, is because the work in a way we would like the world to work. Stories have structure and reason. In stories, everything makes sense. The hero triumphs over the adversity he has had to face, and evildoers are punished. This is "fair"--the hero, ultimately, wins. Outside forces conspire against him, sometimes no one believes him, but we, the readers, we know that he is right and the world will recognize it at the end of the book. It seemed like every term at Hogwarts all the students would turn against Harry Potter for some reason or another, but we knew it was okay, and they'd come around to his side eventually, because he was the Chosen One.

I had shaped an idea of myself to be the misunderstood hero in my own story. I lived in a fantasy world where everyone was against me but that it was okay, because I was the hero, and inherently better than all of them just for being me. So they thought I was weird? Silly, foolish people, living their pathetic, small, normal everyday lives. I had bigger fish to fry. I was destined for great things. They wouldn't understand. Of course they didn't understand. I was a different class of human than them. I was special. I was the hero.

I continued to be the misunderstood hero in college, where people continued to think I was weird--perhaps even more so because going from a high school with less than 1,000 people to a college with over 20,000 people was making me retreat even further into my own mind, while anytime I went anywhere, even leaving my dorm room to go down the hall to the bathroom, my heart-rate sped up and breathing became quick, shallow. I had four anxiety attacks that first year at Pitt, curled up on the futon in my dorm room hyperventilating, thinking I was going to die.

Some of my classes were discussion-based, and we were graded on how we could contribute in class. I sat in a class called Intro to Critical Reading, filled with upperclassmen, hearing them raise their hands and offer cogent analyses of Tennyson poems. I would think of something to say and then think about saying it, and my heart-rate would sky-rocket, my palms would get clammy, my breathing would get shallow, and I felt like the walls were closing in on me. Everyone seemed so smart. I started to think that maybe I wasn't better than everyone else, that maybe I was worse than everyone else, that I really was a freak, a weirdo.

Eventually I learned in a class called Evolutionary Psychology that human beings did not evolve to partake in a sedentary lifestyle, and this was incentive-enough for my reason-needing brain to finally start exercising, like all the therapists had always been telling me to do. I was on the swim team in middle school and didn't mind swimming, so I began swimming laps at one of the pools on campus.

The swimming effectively boosted my endorphins to get rid of most of the anxiety I had been experiencing. I began participating in my classes and was even calm and happy enough to start having real conversations with people. 

But there was a new villain in town, in the form of General Education Requirements.

Chapter Five: Math Demons

According to the University of Pittsburgh, the goal of the School of Arts and Sciences is "to provide liberal arts and pre-professional education for undergraduate students that is grounded in scholarly excellence, and offers you the knowledge, understanding, analytical tools, and communication skills to blah blah blah."

I could handle the writing requirements, the course in literature (literary analysis through a broad range of literary texts), the course in the arts (modes of analysis appropriate to music, theater, or the visual arts, and might be a survey, genre, period or artist course), the Second Course in Literature, the Arts, or in Creative Expression, a course in social science (psychology), and even historical change. I could even swing the natural sciences requirements by stumbling upon the fact that Pitt has some fantastic survey-level Astronomy classes that I totally loved due to a lifelong obsession with Star Trek.

Unfortunately, I still had to take two classes in Quantitative and Qualitative reasoning and one in Philosophy. And a college algebra requirement that I'm still not sure why I had to take. I think I failed some sort of entrance exam.

Know this-- I was, and am, and forever shall be, a thoroughly right-brained sort of person. Creativity in thinking will never be a problem for me. I hear classmates complaining about having to write papers, and I laugh, for I know that writing papers is my superpower. I can write a ten page paper the day before it's due and get an A+ and a little note from the professor that says something along the lines of "this is the best paper I have EVER READ in my LIFE."

But put a worksheet with a math problem in front of me and my first instinct is to douse it in gasoline, set it on fire, run out of the building, hail a cab to the airport, and get on the first plane that will take me as far away from having to solve that math problem as humanly possible.

Because other types of learning have always been so easy for me, and because I knew I was the hero in my own story, I felt that I should not have to take math classes. Wasn't it enough that I was a genius at everything else? That professors swooned at my papers and wrote comments genuinely thanking me for actually being able to write and confessing that they get so sick of reading papers written by college students who still can't differentiate between "their" and "there"? Why should I have to take math classes? This wasn't how it was supposed to work. Things weren't supposed to be difficult, or require hard work. I was the hero. Did Harry Potter ever actually study or do homework, or apply himself in any way? Did you ever even see him practice Quiddich? The first time he hopped on a broom, having never rode a broom before, he was proclaimed to be the new greatest Seeker of all time.

The real problem was that I had managed to coast for so long when it came to learning that I had no idea how to learn something that I didn't understand at all.

But now, at my last semester at Pitt, it was down to the final countdown. I was taking care of my final general education requirements, the ones I had been avoiding, withdrawing from, and/or failing for so long. I had an actual F on my transcript from my last attempt at taking a Philosophy class (taught during the summer by a particularly incompetent grad student, I walked out halfway through and never came back), and another F from a class that met the Quantitative reasoning requirement Intro To Computer Programming: Visual Basic (that was supposed to be super easy), as well as a few more Ws from other classes in these areas.

This semester was my last chance. I pinned all my hopes on a class offered by an obscure department known as History and Philosophy of Science, a class called Problem Solving: How Science Works, that seemed to promise of requiring very few actual math problems to be solved for my Quantitative reasoning requirement. I was also taking Intro to Ethics, which was supposed to be the easiest branch of Philosophy to understand for those who are not Philosophically-minded.

I was also taking Senior Seminar in Nonfiction Writing, Global Societies, Intro to Human Nutrition, Psychology of Aging, and Writing the Review. For those not keeping track, that is six classes, or 21 credits, more than I've ever attempted before in a semester. Many semesters I've just gotten six credits due to my habit of Withdrawing At The Slightest Sign Of Adversity.

And I was alone again, living in a small efficiency apartment in a terrible neighborhood that was a thirty-minute bus ride from campus. My last roommate, who had been my friend until we got an apartment together, had turned out to have Histrionic personality disorder. That means if you don't constantly pay attention to her she will follow you around making small talk while you are trying to watch tv, make dinner, or just chillax. If you sing a song to yourself she will try to sing along. Also she had started dating a guy who was a complete tool and she ate all my food. Needless to say, I was pretty much over the whole "having a roommate" thing.

My other roommate, with whom I trauma-bonded over the horrors of having our other roommate follow us around the apartment all the time, had graduated and moved back in with her parents. My boyfriend had graduated and moved to Ithaca, New York, where he was attending law school. We didn't "officially" break up on the move, but we probably should have. My boyfriends' friends, with whom I had been spending most of my time, graduated too and moved away, and probably wouldn't have hung out with me without him present anyway.

I had some underclassmen friends who went to my high school, but it now seemed like I lived too far away for me to visit them anymore.

But I was going to all my classes, spending the majority of time on the bus, and there was a cloud of "this is your last chance-- no withdrawing from any classes this time." hanging over my head everywhere I went. I applied for December graduation, and did not register for classes for the spring in the middle of the semester. This was it.

And then, in Problem Solving: How Science Works, we turned to chapter five-- the scientific principles of thermodynamics. And there, on the very first page of chapter five, was an equation:

P= w/t = (mg)h/ t

And there were more equations. And numbers. And we had to do the equations. With the numbers.

Fuck.

I tried, really I did. I tried to do the homework, and solve the equations, and pay attention in class. But it was math. I had to fight the urge to reach for the can of gasoline every time I walked into that class.

Finally, I made an appointment with my academic adviser. Just for insurance, I told myself. Just in case. To see what my options are.

My adviser was named Mark Kemp and he was the chair of the English department (I think). He was about forty or fifty, with a handsome, tanned, friendly intelligent-looking face, short-ish hair, and wire rimmed glasses. I usually saw him sitting at a desk, so was surprised one day when I saw him in the basement of the Cathedral of Learning, by the Starbucks, and realized he was shorter than me. He taught a class called Satire that was supposed to be pretty good- they read Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood, one of my favorite books (a dystopian future/ apocalyptic tale with a theme about evolution and the essentially "flawed" nature of humanity, etc, etc).

Mark Kemp's office had been relocated, to a strange corner office with a high ceiling and corner window. It was on the fifth floor of the Cathedral of Learning. I walked in. It was possible I was on the verge of a mental breakdown because of the math. I saw he had a new office-mate too, a pretty, slim, middle-aged woman with curly dark red hair. She looked like she could be a character in a novel. I saw her and narrowed my eyes, feeling competitive. (I had a bit of a crush on Mark Kemp.)

He was surprised to see me, of course. The last appointment I had with him was supposed to be..well, the last appointment I had with him. I acknowledged this, wryly.

"Bet you're surprised to see me," I said, sighing and sitting down. Mark Kemp clicked on things on his computer screen and rifled through folders, as if he was in a play and these were the stage directions for the part of Academic Adviser. "Yes, I saw you scheduled the appointment online...and- just one second, sorry" He smiled at me, and clicked on the computer some more, and I wondered if he remembered who I was. We had an English-nerd bonding moment, once, long ago. I had told him I had signed up to take his class "Roaring 20s Literature" but the dropped it, and he said he never taught such a class. I said I was pretty sure it was him, which is ridiculous, because he would know what classes he was teaching better than I would. We argued about it confusedly, and at the same time concluded that it was a moot point, because I didn't take the class anyway. We both used that word out loud at the same time- "moot," pausing to laugh at the coincidence, and to realize that we were soulmates. (Not really.)

But at this appointment I had other things on my mind, like the fact that I might not graduate from college this December and my scholarship would run out. My parents would probably be willing to pay for another semester, but they wouldn't be thrilled about it. Also this was supposed to be my big successful moment in life. This was supposed to be triumphant, the final push of Act Three. Against all odds, against a profound stubbornness problem, sudden dearth of social support again, and inability to do math, our heroine graduated college with a final semester of 21 credits! Or not, if I couldn't do these thermodynamics equations, which I was pretty sure I couldn't.

I tried to make Mark Kemp understand the severity of my inability to do math problems, but he seemed determinately optimistic, waving my problems aside as pre-graduation jitters.

"But what happens if I fail this class?" I asked him. "What happens??"

"You're probably not going to fail," he said, cheerfully, "You're almost there!"

"But what if I do?" I asked. "I missed registration for next semester and everything."

"Well there are options," he said, and proceeded to spout a series of academic bureaucratic loopholes that nevertheless did not sound like they would make my parents any less disappointed in me for making them pay for another semester and for them having to tell their friends that I wasn't actually graduating this winter after all.

"How are all your other classes? What else are you taking?" Mark Kemp asked me now, still cheerful. I did not understand how he failed to grasp the severity of this situation. I guess he couldn't see the math-problem-demons who were presently trying to eat my brain.

"Uh..Writing the Review," I said, trying to focus. "Senior Seminar in Non-fiction. Intro to Human Nutrition.."

"Oh, that's interesting. Nutrition? Why are you taking that?" he asked.

"Um," I said, as a math demon tried to grab a parcel of brain synapses and munch on them. "Well, I'm lactose intolerant, so I kind of wanted to understand what that was..."

"Ah," he said, nodding, and smiling. "And cooking, do you like cooking?"

"I don't know! I guess!" I said, still irritated. The redheaded woman at the corner desk looked up and smiled at us, then looked back at her computer. This was probably par for the course for them, students coming in and freaking out about grades. They were pros. "Keep them calm, try to distract them", is probably what it said in some handbook for advisers somewhere. "Yeah, I do a lot of cooking. Asian food, that kind of stuff. Stuff without milk in it, I have to cook it myself, " I tried to start form this last phrase into some sort of joke, but failed- "because there's milk in like, everything."

"And you're taking writing the review, you said, right?" he said. Why was he being so cheerful? He couldn't see the math-demons ripping my neurons into pieces. "You could write restaurant reviews! Or write about food!"

Why was he taunting me with the fact that there are no writing jobs? My professor at my writing the review class outright told us that it was literally impossible to get jobs writing reviews, or any newspaper jobs, or magazines, or anything. Was this some sort of sick joke? Not to mention that it's hard to be a restaurant reviewer when you can't eat half the stuff in most restaurants. Another student appeared at the doorway, hesitantly. Mark Kemp waved at her and smiled. He stood up to indicate our meeting was over. I stood up too.

"You'll be fine!" he said, patting me on the back, herding me out the door.

Judgment day came on a Tuesday. It was our midterm for Problem Solving: How Science Works, and it would contain the thermodynamics equations. Before the exam, I was meeting my friend Andrew for lunch. He was a good-natured, studious young man, tall and skinny, majoring in Engineering. He had gone to my high school.

We met at Taiwan Cafe on Forbes Avenue. The proprietor of Taiwan Cafe used to own Sushi Boat, up the street, where I had been a regular, at one point averaging one Alaska Roll order a day (a delicious combination of Smoked Salmon and Avocado, and only Sushi Boat managed to consistently keep their salmon and avocado selection perfect ). This proprietor was a very short Chinese man and smiled at me and said "Ah! Alaska!" when I came in, as if it was my nickname. When I found out he and most of his staff were moving to Taiwan Cafe, where his wife worked, I loyally followed him there.

Taiwan Cafe was in a kind of dirty basement, and their main attraction was the fact that they sold beer along the one wall (a rare thing indeed in Pennsylvania). I was "off" Alaska rolls now and had switched to Orange Peel Chicken, which was what I ordered now, with Andrew. Andrew ordered Pork Lo Mein. I didn't know the woman taking our order, but the little Chinese man from Sushi Boat walked by in the kitchen and waved and smiled at me, and the sushi chef, a middle aged Chinese woman with a serious face, smiled at me. "There's our loyal customer, Alaska," I imaged them thinking.

Andrew and I sat at one of the dirty booths, and I told him my problem of the the thermodymanic equations. That is, my Problem Of The Thermodynamic Equations. It had a nice ring to it: Harry Potter and the Problem of the Thermodynamic Equations. Harry Potter and the Quest To Graduate With A Degree In English That Will Probably Prove To Be Useless In This Economy Anyway But Nevertheless It's An Accomplishment.

"So, do you want to take this test for me?" I asked Andrew. I would say I was only about 15% joking, but I was not surprised when he smiled and said no.

"Well, I'm not going to take it," I said. "There's no point. I'll fail. I don't understand any of this stuff."

"Thermodynamics isn't so bad," said Andrew thoughtfully, chewing on a piece of pork and staring into the air at what I could only assume were imaginary equations. Math problems probably didn't look like demons to him, they probably looked like...I don't know. Amusement parks? Fun Video Games? Fluffy Kittens? I was always in awe of math people because I couldn't do math. I saw them as magical elves, where I was just the dumb hobbit, plodding along with only the status as Hero getting me through the myriad of evil forces that certainly would have killed me in seconds were I not so Inherently Heroic. "It's like physics."

"I could never do physics either!" I said."

"It's just a matter of balancing the equation," Andrew continued.

"I can't do it. I just can't." I said, not even listening to him. "I'm not going to take the test." It was true. I had pretty much decided not to take the test, which would mean I would fail the class, and have to stay at Pitt an additional semester. And God knows what other Qualitative Reasoning class I'd be able to take next semester. This general education credit had been haunting me since I was a freshman. Maybe I'd never be able to get the credit. Maybe I'd never get a college degree because of the stupid math demons.

"Have you been doing the homework?" asked Andrew.

"I've been trying," I said. "But I can't do it. I can't do math problems. I've never been able to do math."

"Just take the test," he said. "Seriously, just go ahead and take it. It's better than just not taking it. I mean, if you don't take it, you'll definitely fail. But if you take it you might fail, but you still might not fail. You know?"

We finished our meal. He had a lab to go on the other side of campus. "Good luck!" he said. I watched him go, shaking my head in disbelief. Math people. They were like a different species. I looked towards upper campus, where the exam would start in twenty minutes, and I had a crazy idea. Why not take the test?

Chapter Last: Narrative Symmetry

An Open Letter To The Makers Of Duncan Hines Instant Brownie Mix:

Dear Sirs or Madams;

I returned this summer to my hometown, after graduating from the University of Pittsburgh. I suppose I had become used to Pittsburgh's (although not stellar) diverse food selection, and returning to a very small town made me realize I was going to have to re-evaluate my eating habits.

I had lunch at a diner the other day, and when I finished eating my delicious Hog Maw (stuffed pig's intestines, a Pennsylvania Dutch staple) the waitress asked me what kind of ice cream I wanted for my dessert. Upon seeing my quizzical look, she added "disha ice-cream's free fer every meal." I shook my head no. No free ice cream for me.

To be honest, my inability to eat ice cream doesn't really bother me anymore. I had been lactose intolerant for about seven years now, and I'm okay with that. Sure, eating or figuring out what to eat is a little extra effort for me, while most people can just eat whatever they want, but that's life, isn't it? Sometimes you have to work harder at things than other people do. And I've been kind of operantly/classically conditioned (via Pavlov's dogs) to not even want to eat ice cream or pizza anymore, because my brain links pizza and ice cream to painful digestive discomfort.

I guess I should count myself as lucky, too, that, since becoming lactose intolerant, my consumption of chocolate and chocolate-based dessert items has been limited to those I am willing to cook myself (using soymilk instead of real milk). A massive problem in maintaining an attractive, slim weight for women is the constant temptation of low-cost delicious chocolately treats available at every corner drugstore in America.

So I was not sure whether to hate you or love you, the fine people of Duncan Hines instant brownie mix, because of the one fateful day I first discovered, upon picking up a box of your aforementioned product at the grocery store and scanning the list of ingredients, that there was not a drop of a single dairy product contained within.

Your competitor, Betty Crocker's instant brownie mix, includes milk. So does, I am relatively certain, every other pre-made brownie or packaged dessert item available at every grocery store or convenience store in the country.

I am not sure what made you neglect to include milk in a product for which most other food companies throw it in as the fifth ingredient listed. Is it some oversight by the person who first wrote the recipe, perpetuated by some old Duncan Hines by-law that states that the instant brownie recipe not be changed over the course of its existence as a brownie-producing empire? Or perhaps one of "my" people, a fellow lactose intolerant, was high-up in the company and decided to omit the milk component of the brownie mix for his or her own unhampered personal enjoyment of the product? I could not say, nor do I particularly care.

I will say this, though; damn you Duncan Hines. Damn you to hell. Have you seen the amount of commercials on television advertising some crazy expensive weight-loss torture device that will limit your ability to consume large amounts of food or put a handle on your appetite? I have one built in to my body. Granted, it is annoying, and terrible, but it is extremely effective in forcing me not to purchase a single low-fuss chocolate dessert every time I walk into a food-purchasing place because of the digestive problems that chocolate will produce in me.

I am far too lazy to be making chocolate desserts from scratch using soymilk, especially when they are bad for you anyway. But with the discovery of  your milk-free chocolate dessert product, I can add one egg, 1/3 a cup of water, 1/3 a cup of oil, mix, pour into a pan, and in twenty minutes I am able to consume 1,000 calories of divine chocolatey ecstasy.  I am now back to being a normal, guilt-stricken, weight-worrying chocolate-tempted woman. I hope you're happy.

sincerely,

me.