Where I Live

Blatantly ripping off my friend Emily who shares a Creative Nonfiction class with me, but I haven't posted anything in a while, so I say it's okay. We recently read an excerpt from Nora Ephron's I Feel Bad About My Neck and were told to mimic the style. Emily posted her version of "Where I Live," so I felt it was only fair to share mine. No shame in that, right?

Where I Live

1. I live at my computer. It sits on my desk, which is situated so I can tilt my head up and look outside the only window in my bedroom. I tend to look from one window to the other, seeing an organic world outside one and an interconnected world inside the other. From my computer I do homework, talk to my friends, and learn what’s happening in the world. Occasionally, I eat meals there, and I’ve even been known to sleep with my head resting on the keyboard. When I do this, I usually wake up to find a sun shyly peeking over the mountain out one window and an unfinished essay (accompanied by a long chain of kkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk, lllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll,sssssssssssssssssssssssssss, or some other home row letter) inside the other.

2. I live on the Internet. My browser even saves my usual hangouts: Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, Mineral Area College’s home page, and Sputnikmusic.com. When I want to laugh, I read a webcomic. When I want to learn, I search Google. When I want to say something, I go to... well, that depends on what I want to say. If I want to say something mildly personal, or if I have a witty remark, I tell Twitter—a task I used to reserve for Facebook, which I now only go to if I want to say something that will get some likes. Twitter is practically an extension of my brain. I think in tweets now. Yesterday my friend Jenn was showing my the theater campus at SEMO, including the part of the scene shop’s ceiling where someone actually wrote the word gullible. Like that joke kids used to pull on each other in middle school. I reached for my cell phone to take a picture. “This will make an awesome tweet,” I told Jenn, and then thought to myself, “I’ll tweet it with the caption ‘You’ll never believe what someone wrote on the ceiling. My followers will love it.” Nobody replied to it, nobody re-tweeted it, and nobody favorited it. I go to Twitter to talk to others, to tell jokes. It’s like I told the joke to myself.

3. Good thing I also live at MAC, where I can actually talk to people, in person. Because of my active involvement in the college’s theater program, I have two choices: drive to MAC for classes, come back home, and drive back for play practices, or drive to MAC and stay there after classes are done and wait for rehearsals to start. It’s easier just to live there.

4. Having said that, I do live in my car, despite trying to spend as little gas money as possible. On any given day, I spend at least an hour in my car in transit (my house is half an hour away from everything). I listen to more music in my car than I do anywhere else. It’s got a decent radio, and when I got bored with the local stations I can plug in my iPod and listen to my own music library until I get bored of it and switch to the radio. I probably sing in my car more than I do anywhere else, too.

5. Well, maybe not. I live in my trailer (it’s separate from my actual house), which is where I keep my guitar and amplifier. The trailer is far enough away from the house that I can crank it up as loud as I want, and sing as loud (and/or terribly) as I want. The trailer is quiet. It’s not like Twitter and Facebook, where always has something to say, and it’s not like my car, where I have to turn up the volume to drown out the sound of wind roaring against my car at sixty miles per hour. Yes, the trailer is quiet. And I like it. It lets me think. I can fill it with my own noise, or just enjoy the lack thereof. It’s great for pacing back and forth and just... thinking. It’s the only place I live that’s quiet enough for that. And it’s a good place to sleep (which I’ve been known to do).