Day 3: Scandinavia!

Our initial plan for Day 3 was to drive an hour to Milwaukee, check out a Great Lake and visit a museum that Steven had discovered in his "365 places you should see before you die" calendar that I had given him for Christmas. Steven has this habit of mentioning a new place for us to live every day. We should move to Morocco! We should move to Corpus Christie! We should move to Alaska! Etc, etc. It can be triggered by any bit of stimuli that he picks up throughout the day. Maybe it came to him in a dream. Maybe it was the background of a McDonald's commercial. Maybe he heard someone say a word similar to state name. The sky's the limit. I have learned, after 16 months, to not get freaked out and start planning our futures around these ever changing plans. Rather, I like to influence them, to see how outlandish they can get. Thus, the desk calendar.

However, like the rest of our plans, we never got to Milwaukee, the great lake, or a museum of any kind. On Friday morning Steven slept until noon, and I watched The Office and Grey's Anatomy on my laptop, while drinking Dr. Pepper for breakfast. It was better than anything I could've planned. After sending away Housekeeping 4 times, we finally embraced the day and decided to drop in on the Indian restaurant that had caused us so much grief. Steven's car, however, did not think much of this plan. Apparently the indestructible beast is starting to show his age. Halfway down the Beltline Highway, I felt a small shift beneath us. I thought nothing of it, as Iggy is constantly bumping around and I just turn up the music to block it out. Luckily, Steven is the main driver of our relationship. He pulled over to the side of the road and I immediately assumed that we had popped a tire, run out of gas, or left something on the roof. It is always a safe bet that my assumptions are wrong. If you find yourself lost, with the decision of turning left or right, always ask me. 100% of the time. I will choose the wrong answer, eliminating the need for any guesswork. It turns out that the car had slipped out of gear. I don't really understand this, given that the car is an automatic, but that's what Steven says, so I believe him. The car I first learned to drive was a Crown Victoria. It, too, had a problem with gears. You would have to line up the gear with the letter marked R to go forward. N meant reverse and 1 meant park. Or something like that. I don't remember the order and the Google image search I just did yielded nothing useful. The main idea is that the letters there to help you, didn't help. You just had to memorize the car's new broken language, and drive accordingly. The good thing about Steven's new car language was that I was released from any driving responsibility for the rest of the trip. I had put in my two hours from Wendy's to Iowa City and now I had a foolproof excuse to stay in the passenger seat. Again, better than I could've ever planned.

We finally got to the Indian restaurant after a few more trips to the side of the road. We arrived just at the tail end of their lunch buffet, and tried to wheedle our way into a free meal. Indian women, however, are immune to Steven's charms and my sheepish shrugs. We got a table and ordered drinks before taking a peek at the buffet. Can you guess what's coming? Oh yes. Another mistake. The rice was crunchy, the chicken dry, the curry clumpy the whole thing picked over and less than appetizing. It was my first experience with Indian food, but I'm going to give it the benefit of the doubt and assume that it was not the top of the line. Steven tried a bunch of curries and I ate rice and some strange meatball dish. At least this way my stomach would be ready for a real meal later on. We paid and left, regretting the decision, the food and the amount of time it took.

Steven had scheduled a campus tour at 3:30. I had been trying to get out of it from the first moment he mentioned it. I've given campus tours for three years. I knew that 3:30 on the Friday of spring break would not be a fun, informative, or energetic experience. It would be a waste of time and, as a former tour guide, I felt it my duty to save our poor guide the extra work of entertaining the two of us, who only wanted to find out where Lorrie Moore's office was. We got to campus and found another coin operated parking garage. What is the point of having garages with meters? Isn't the purpose of a garage so that you can pay with your card and guess the toll booth person's name? Ridiculous. The campus, at first sight, was massive. Buildings, buildings, everywhere. We found the Union on accident and went in to try to find a map and someone to give us change. The first floor of the Union was like a Court House. Big pillars, expensive old furniture, reception desks and long hallways. It was also strangely quiet. We headed downstairs at the advice of the first reception desk. It was like a completely different world. According to Steven, it was Scandinavia. I just thought it felt like a train station. There were people everywhere, souvenir shops and college memorabilia. The food court wound around different pillars, weaving in between the shops and information counters. We stopped to get quarters at a coffee shop, but they cheerlessly would only give us 2 dollars worth. It was a zoo, and I didn't like it one bit. "Is this how LSU was?" I asked, wondering if K-State was the only campus that didn't terrify me. "No. LSU was exactly like K-State." He answered, looking as confused as I felt. Though, he was still imagining himself in Scandinavia, so we weren't really on the same wavelength. We got a few more dollars turned into meter money and headed back upstairs to the quiet calm of deserted hallways.

Here's a picture of me, catching my breath outside the mayhem. You can tell it's me, because my eyes aren't open. This is one of the main reasons that most of my vacation pictures are of other people.



Steven took this picture of the ceiling, whispering Scandinavia, over and over again, under his breath. While he was taking it, I backed into three people trying to come in. Stress makes me awkward. It's one of my many gifts.



Across the street from the Union we found a library and a campus map. I liked the first floor of the library, as it included a reading room. The reading room had popular fiction in paperback, board games, a coffee shop and movies to rent. This is something that I think Hale sorely needs. While I agree that it is primarily for academic purposes, you've also got to cater to the demographic. But that's just the hip librarian in me talking. Someday... someday. We found a map and looked up Lorrie Moore's office number. The computers in the reading room were all macs. How did apple get to be such a status symbol for our generation? We left the library and headed back to the car, determined to find a long-range parking garage now that we were armed with the correct currency. As we pulled in, we were stopped at the booth to get a ticket. Hmm, that's interesting. Then we pulled into a spot and saw - no meters. Naturally. Now that we had turned the rest of our cash into quarters, we finally found the parking garage that you could pay in cash. Or check. Or credit. Was there ever any doubt? If you have been following along you will also not be shocked at what happened next. When exiting the building, we realized that I had been reading the map wrong. We needed to go back the direction that we came. In fact, we needed to go back to the Library where we got the map, because Lorrie Moore's office is in the building attached to the Library. Right above our heads. I sincerely hope that you, dear reader, are not as shocked by this as we were. I am constantly impressed that I continue to survive.

And now, here we were. Standing in front of the elevator, ready to rise to the 6th floor, the land of Lorrie Moore. We had our books. We were brimming with love and nervous energy and geeky enthusiasm about meeting our favorite author. I mean, this is the woman who brought us together, in a way. We were reading Birds of America in Imad's creative writing workshop. On the second day of class, Steven made a comment about the story "Williing" that I had been waiting to make, but he beat me to it. And it was that comment that made me realize a. He was the smartest person in the class and b. I would hate him for it. It is that hatred that made me full of delight when he sent me the two word facebook email about my second story. And it was that two word facebook email that convinced me that we were soulmates. 16 months later, those two words are still sticking. So naturally, when we rode the elevator and arrived outside her door, the whole place was deserted. Dark. Locked. Not a breath of life. She was on Spring Break too. We hadn't run into her in Scandinavia. We hadn't seen her eating crappy Indian food. She was not one of the teenage boys who had been watching basketball for 13 hours at Old Chicago. For all we knew she was in Manhattan, KS, looking for her favorite readers. Of course she wasn't doing that, but it was the only fantasy left.

So Lorrie, if you are googling yourself and find this blog - we came to see you. The windows outside your office are very pretty. It was surprisingly difficult to find copies of your books in local bookstores. And that girl Heather who is in your old office - well, we didn't care too much for her publication on the table. Come back soon.



After the disappointment of the lack of Lorrie, we headed down to State St. for some shopping, coffee and Jamba Juice. It took me a long time to get the hang of the stores - I tried to enter the Goodwill Boutique three times and kept ending up in the poster store next door. But eventually we found some nice shops, interesting people, and quality coffee. I lured Steven into a massive used clothing store called "Ragstock" and he helped me search the racks for a purple t-shirt to go with the dress he picked out for me. After 45 minutes we both couldn't stop sneezing, so I took what I couldn't live without and we had our first shopping bag of the trip. This was important, because Madison is a hippy liberal town and they don't like to give out plastic shopping bags. This meant that my purchases were kept stashed in my purse, which was already filled with the Lorrie Moore books that had not been signed. Feeling relieved that I had finally found a store on my list, we spied the Jamba Juice across the street and practically skipped toward the sunny land of expensive blended fruit.


Every day is improved with a 5 dollar smoothie. After the Jamba Juice rejuvenation, we hit a few bookstores, including a place called "Shakti" which was one of those annoying Eastern ideology shops that sells expensive elephant pillows, yoga mats and books on psychedelics. State St. was littered with these places, but we continued to be lured in by the colors and the interesting shop names. I also tried to find some dresses at an Indian dress boutique, but the owner was a frightening man who pulled the dressing room curtain out behind a wall of dresses and demanded that I try something on. Having a dressing room in the middle of the merchandise is not a great selling method. We also ventured into Madison's feminist bookstore - "A Room of One's Own" and found no Virginia Woolf, but the first copies of Lorrie Moore's books that we had found on the whole trip. I bought Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? which now completes the set. She has a new book coming out in September, and after that I don't know what I'm going to do. Collect different editions? Buy more for friends? Find someone new to love? It's a daunting possibility.

For dinner that evening we went for Sushi at Takara. Sushi, like Jamba Juice, will make everything better. We had miso soup with tofu, edamame, and a feast of Takara's finest rolls. I've never been a fan of sashimi. This might make me only a pseudo fan of sushi, but it makes me too happy to care.

Hello, happiness.


We were going to try to catch "Doubt" at the Majestic Theatre down the street, but we decided to end on a high note and took our stuffed selves over to Michael's custard for dessert. (It was not as good as Freddy's. And more expensive.) We ended the evening with basketball and crankiness. It's almost required, on a 10 hour roadtrip, and 4 days together that we squabble at least a little. We chose Day 3 for our squabbling, which ended with a trip to Wal-Mart at 1 am in the snow. When I went to sleep it was 40 degrees. When I woke up, big flakes were falling and we could not get through the night without a bag of potato chips and more cans of Dr. Pepper. The fridge in the room was really cold, you see, and in the morning, we would pour the pop into those little hotel cups and it would have this thin layer of ice at the top, like a homemade icee. We needed that. And so, after arriving at Wal-Mart and realizing that it was not open 24 hours, and that there were a random group of people huddled together under the awning, waiting for something we weren't privy to, we found the nearest gas station, got what we needed and fell asleep for good.

Day 3 was not remarkable, and State St. was not the magical place that I had envisioned. But it is still the city of Lorrie, and therefore, something special.