2008 Woodie Awards
A Pocket Full of Mumbles
Reflections on a summer wasted
Elizabeth Pusack
Issue date: 9/28/06 Section: Features
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This summer I wasn't an intern:
This summer I wasn't an intern; I did several productive things. For example, I momentarily did grunt work at Iowa City's premier boutique hotel. It was no Soho House London, but I did learn never to eat crab cakes, never to have a wedding reception and how to artfully scatter rose petals on Egyptian cotton. The aforementioned premier boutique hotel is situated on Iowa City's premier people watching venue. The Pedestrian Mall, or "ped mall," is a place where one may sit and sip her cherry-almond Italian soda free from the screeches and honks of cars, semis, tractors and horse-drawn carriages alike. Lacking adventure or activity it is possible to spend hours whittling away one's time observing (anthropologically of course) the belle-de-peds. They come in one of two varieties: the politely spoiled girls who wander around the centre-ville all day smoking filched cigarettes, drinking coffee, doing the crossword and reading library books (Simone de Beauvoir), and the beau-de-peds riding vintage bikes, sporting newsboy caps and perching on ledges reading Kerouac and his cronies with rolled smokes tucked behind their ears. They mostly come out at night to make shadows under the streetlamps. If I wasn't doing that, I did this:
I went for drives:
One day my ring got run over by a car. I was hanging my arm out the window - like Pete and Pete's dad, a man whose confidence is directly related to how far his elbow protrudes when he's in the driver's seat - and it just slipped right off my finger. I immediately careened to the edge of the road and bounded out to the median to search for it. Some bland compact whizzed by. It was flattened. The "gem" laying ten yards away was covered in tire treads. I had been listening to Fiona Apple: "If there was a better way to go then it would find me/I can't help but the road just rolls out behiiiind me/Be kind to me, or treat me mean/I'll make the most of it/I'm an extraordinary machine." I salvaged the pieces and reassembled it with some 15-year-old 3M super glue I found in my dad's "adhesives drawer," not to be confused with the junk drawer where I found the paper clip with which to clamp it, or the twisty tie drawer that has become obsolete in the age of Ziploc. Now my ring has magical powers like the pack of Marlboro reds Flory resuscitated after it was run over by a semi, or like David's grandfather who lost his arm to a truck by sticking it too far out the window. But we'll make the most of it; we are extraordinary machines.
This summer I wasn't an intern; I did several productive things. For example, I momentarily did grunt work at Iowa City's premier boutique hotel. It was no Soho House London, but I did learn never to eat crab cakes, never to have a wedding reception and how to artfully scatter rose petals on Egyptian cotton. The aforementioned premier boutique hotel is situated on Iowa City's premier people watching venue. The Pedestrian Mall, or "ped mall," is a place where one may sit and sip her cherry-almond Italian soda free from the screeches and honks of cars, semis, tractors and horse-drawn carriages alike. Lacking adventure or activity it is possible to spend hours whittling away one's time observing (anthropologically of course) the belle-de-peds. They come in one of two varieties: the politely spoiled girls who wander around the centre-ville all day smoking filched cigarettes, drinking coffee, doing the crossword and reading library books (Simone de Beauvoir), and the beau-de-peds riding vintage bikes, sporting newsboy caps and perching on ledges reading Kerouac and his cronies with rolled smokes tucked behind their ears. They mostly come out at night to make shadows under the streetlamps. If I wasn't doing that, I did this:
I went for drives:
One day my ring got run over by a car. I was hanging my arm out the window - like Pete and Pete's dad, a man whose confidence is directly related to how far his elbow protrudes when he's in the driver's seat - and it just slipped right off my finger. I immediately careened to the edge of the road and bounded out to the median to search for it. Some bland compact whizzed by. It was flattened. The "gem" laying ten yards away was covered in tire treads. I had been listening to Fiona Apple: "If there was a better way to go then it would find me/I can't help but the road just rolls out behiiiind me/Be kind to me, or treat me mean/I'll make the most of it/I'm an extraordinary machine." I salvaged the pieces and reassembled it with some 15-year-old 3M super glue I found in my dad's "adhesives drawer," not to be confused with the junk drawer where I found the paper clip with which to clamp it, or the twisty tie drawer that has become obsolete in the age of Ziploc. Now my ring has magical powers like the pack of Marlboro reds Flory resuscitated after it was run over by a semi, or like David's grandfather who lost his arm to a truck by sticking it too far out the window. But we'll make the most of it; we are extraordinary machines.
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