When I am alone on dark streets at night, I sometimes pull out my phone and have a conversation with myself. While that sounds pretty special all on its own, sometimes I bring it to the next level and “converse” in either Italian or Russian. I’ve taken three years of Russian and a year of Italian. While that doesn’t make me fluent in either of them, I know enough of both languages to throw random real words into a blend of Russian or Italian sounds. When I can’t think of what words to speak next, I “listen to the other speaker.”

It’s easier to converse in Russian. Two units ago, my class learned how to say simple things on the phone: “Hello”, “How are you?”, “Listen to me!”, “Meet me at the Dacha!”, “At 8 o’clock? No I can’t do 8, I am going to the zoo.”

Italian is a bit tougher for me, since I’ve had less time speaking Italian than singing it. I’ve been learning Italian arias and art songs since I was eleven years old and so I typically just speak the lyrics when I’m pretending to speak on the phone in Italian. The conversation will go like so:

Bonjorno. (Pause). Come va? Sto bene, sto bene. Se tu m’ami, se tu so spiri. (Pause). Sol per me, gentil pastor. (Pause). Ho dolor dei tuoi martiri. (Pause)

And it goes on. I find this not only a pretty successful way to ward off crazy people on the street who want my attention, but it’s also pretty entertaining.

And when I’m with a friend and we’re passing crazy people on the street, I sometimes start speaking to my friend in a different language. Typically, they have no idea at first why I’m speaking to them in a different language all of a sudden. But, after the first few times, but they nod and smile at me, waiting for the crazy person to pass so I can be normal again. If the crazy person insists on speaking to us, we look at them confusedly and I tell him that we don’t speak English in either Italian or Russian. They usually understand the word “English” and don’t bother responding.

Apparently though, the crazy people on the North side of town are a little more educated than those downtown, where I live.

I was meeting my friend Carin for coffee down there around 9 o’clock, and we decided to take a walk. We were having a delightful time when some six ft tall man who looked like he had escaped from the Confederate Army with sleeping bags and his entire kit on his back, came limping toward us. He had long, greasy brown hair, a thick beard, and some sort of dirtied uniform on.

We were the only two on the sidewalk besides him. We watched him anxiously, our heartbeats accelerating. As we kept walking toward him, Carin searched frantically for mace in her gigantic pocketbook, and I began to speak at her in Italian.

The man was saying something to himself, without even a prop that would make him seem less crazy. As he came closer, we heard him say quite loudly, “Cackle, cackle, cackle!”

It took a second before my survival mechanism enabled me to call to mind the lyrics of “La Donna é Mobile”: “La donna è mobile,” I said, gesturing excitedly. “ Qual piuma al vento. Muta d’accento — e di pensiero. Sempre un amabile, leggiadro viso, in pianto o in riso, — è menzognero!”

I said all of this as quickly as I could as we passed him, not looking in his direction. He just kept repeating, “cackle cackle cackle” to himself, though he must have been listening to me the whole time. For when we had gotten about ten feet away from him, and thought we were home free, we were stopped dead in our tracks.

La donna è mobile qual piuma al vento
Muta d’accento e di pensier!
e di pensier!
e di pensier!

He sang. His last “pensier” lasted quite awhile, until he ran out of breath. It seemed he had the lungs of a swimmer.

We didn’t turn around and watched him in the reflection of a store window just ahead. He didn’t come closer, but had turned around and was singing to us.

It would be fairytalish to say that he was a great singer and that we had turned around and sang the next verse. But to be quite blunt, he was an awful singer. At least he was loud enough for his voice to echo on the streets.

We watched his reflection in the side window of a store. After his refrain, he began to limp back toward us, perhaps expecting an opera to erupt.

Instead, we ran like hell to my car and played Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band on the way back to Carin’s house.

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Here’s how my school gym works: You enter and they scan your Student ID, you walk downstairs to an area where you can check out one of those key-locks and a towel. Then you proceed to the locker room. You stuff your stuff in one of those long lockers, slap the lock on it, take your key, your ipod, and your water upstairs to the cardio room. When you’re done with the elliptical machine, you hop on the treadmill and run for a half hour. Afterwards, you get this little feeling of superiority inspired by the fact that you still feel like you’re walking on a giant conveyor belt. You glide into the weight room, lift ten pound weights and feel like you could be that bandana-woman on the tampax posters until you become intimidated by giant frat guys and football players lifting twice your own weight. You stretch like you only meant to be in there for two minutes and walk quickly back to the locker room, realizing that you just sweat so much in the cardio room that you must look like you just escaped a lochness abduction. You take that very important locker key, open your locker, strip, grab your towel, conditioner, and soap, lock your locker, and hit the showers.

Now if you’re me last Wednesday, you’ve gotten this far but made one fatal mistake: you forgot to remove the key from your lock before you walked to the showers. I hadn’t realized this until I had taken a nice, steamy shower and humiliated myself in front of the other showering gym-goers (I thought no one was around when I attempted to shave my legs, lifting them one-by-one at nearly 90 degrees to my body and bracing them against the shower wall, giving them a graphic anatomy lesson).

These three, perfect-bodied blondies stopped to stare at me for about five seconds with their mouths agape, an eternity when they exchanged looks directly afterwards. I lowered my leg from where it was on the shower-cubicle wall, stopped admiring my flexibility. I snapped my towel off its hook and turned off the shower as they drifted away in a daze.

I really, really wanted to get dressed. I rushed to my locker without the aforementioned key, ran back to my shower, thinking I’d left it behind, and then began to panic. I pulled on the lock, hoping I’d get lucky and it would pop open.

My first class was in half an hour.

God forbid I should ever be stranded on a desert island – I consider the contents of my gym bag as necessary to my survival as food. In ten minutes, my curly hair, without maintenance, would look like a byproduct of electric shock therapy.

In a panicked frenzy, I paced back and forth for about 20 seconds, breathing heavily. I pathetically tugged on the lock as my bottom lip began to protrude, preparing to quiver. I sat down on the concrete bench and held my face in my hands until I heard a trio of voices advancing. The same three girls were heading toward me, talking about their opposition to tights, as they really all focused on me, avoiding even looking at me. They were still about 20 feet away when I abandoned my conditioner and soap, fled the bench and ran into the sauna to hide.

I sat down on one of the wooden shelves – the heat felt good, but I once again thought of my hair and the tragedy it would become when it dried without anti-frizz serum. I wondered how long it would be until I could come out and they would be gone. Some other girl came in, spread out her towel and lay naked on top of it on the wooden shelf across from me. To avoid seeming like I was watching her, I mirrored her and lay naked on top my own towel.

I didn’t realize I was falling asleep until I woke up drenched in sweat, feeling as though my head were too big for my body. I stumbled out of the sauna and nearly passed out.

What time was it? I ran out into the locker area and found a mounted clock– somehow 45 minutes had passed. No key. My second class started in twenty minutes. I don’t know if it was an effect of the sauna, my panic, or both, but I became conscious of my racing heartbeat.

I sat down in front of my locker and began to cry. A Mexican woman had begun to mop the floor at the end of the row of lockers, but stopped when she saw me walking toward her, dabbing tears from my eyes with the corner of my towel.

“I lost the key to my locker. I’m going to be naked forever,” I told her.

“¿Che?”

Why the hell was I taking Russian?

I grabbed her hand to lead her to my locker and show her the situation – thinking maybe she had a skull key or something.

We made it halfway to my locker before my towel fell off. She stared at me. I stared down at myself and nodded slowly. Why wasn’t I better endowed? Where did I get my breasts from? My father?

Unexpectedly, Maria (so said her nametag) began to laugh her head off as I recovered slightly and suppressed the urge to squeeze her gratefully.

When we reached my locker and I turned the invisible key in the lock and then shrugged my shoulders and lifted my hands palms up in an “I don’t know” gesture, she nodded and held up her pointer finger to mean “one minute”.

Maria disappeared for half-an-hour during which I studied myself in the hall mirror and tried to wipe off the excess make up beneath my eyes with my towel, making the skin red and swollen. My hair had begun to sprout little baby hairs.

Maria returned with a key and I jumped up and down in excitement. She joined me and we jumped together. Then she opened the lock and opened the locker triumphantly.

My first thought: These aren’t my clothes.

Fuck.

All these lockers look alike. Next one over. It was the next one over. It had to be. I tap it hurriedly. Maria put her head in her hands before she left to get the next lock.

When she returned, an authoritative-looking woman accompanied her. Her bright, red lipstick scared me. She was probably there to make sure I wasn’t stealing anything.

I explained the situation to her and promised her I had my Student ID in the locker so that I could prove I wasn’t stealing anything. She opened up the locker and to my relief, my gym bag was hanging peacefully on the hook within it.

Maria clasped her hands together happily and I gave her a giant hug. She returned to her mop bucket and I scrambled to make my 1 o’clock class, arriving just in time to catch the beginning of the Parliament of Foules discussion.

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I’m afraid to die.

I’m afraid of how I’ll die.

Once I took this sociology class in high school and we spent a few weeks learning about execution. Looking back, I’m not sure why we spent so much time discussing it, but we learned about various forms of torture and capital punishment that were now outdated (in most states and countries), such as the guillotine, or the electric chair.

The class must have affected me deeply because my father nicknamed dinnertime, “Tasha’s Death Hour.” I would play my own version of the “Which Would You Rather?” game: “I think I’d rather be drowned than hung,” I’d say as my mother would set down her salad fork with a pungent look of disgust. “When you’re drowned, you supposedly experience intense burning like you’re head’s going to explode. But, personally, I’d prefer that to having my sphincter give out.”

It took a couple of semesters’ break from sociology for me to formulate new concepts about death. In fact, I tried to avoid thinking about it at all, because when I did, my family would find me in my room, staring wide-eyed at the wall for hours wondering how any of us make it to the end without something horrific happening to us.

I was successful concentrating on life until Halloween came around. For the first time, I began to see the value of the cable hook up in my room and watch the Travel Channel. Hour-after-hour, I’d learn about haunted towns in the US and Europe and stories of their hauntings. It never occurred to me to think about what happens after death; I was only fascinated with the tales of deceit that lead to death and tormented souls (none of the spirits who stick around seem to have died of natural causes).

It took me a few weeks to recover after Halloween. I think I began to focus on life more when the Travel Channel switched from stories of hauntings to stories about the best restaurants in the Bahamas. Until then, even a swaying drapery would leave me in an irreconcilable state of dread that could only be assuaged by playing loud music and repeating to myself “This is stupid” about fifty times (really quickly and in a fetal position).

And it wasn’t until last night when I watched Godard’s Pierrot Le Fou that I began to think of death again. Several scenes scared the hell out of me; people were being murdered left and right – being shot to death, having scissors stuffed into their necks…Jean Paul Belmondo’s character was nearly drowned by having his head and face wrapped in his lover’s pretty, red dress and a portable shower head hosing down his nasal cavities.

After about two hours of these scenes, I began to think a little more philosophically than when I was in 10th grade and went to sleep after praying: God, please let me age fast so I can die happily in my sleep.

It seems that when people make it to the end without experiencing one of the many paths to death presented in Pierrot Le Fou, they’ve won some kind of a race; They’ve been luckier than most to make it from start to finish without falling into a sewer.

I’ve been thinking though, isn’t that just what life is? We are born (and unfortunately, bthat’s not a choice we have any control over) and then we die. The whole point of doing anything in life is just to make our journey more interesting and pass the time. Call me a pessimist, but it’s true. Nothing really matters except birth and death.

No way I’m having kids. I don’t want to put someone else through this ridiculous cycle. Okay, so you have a “great” life, you “accomplish” things. All that means is you’ve distracted other people really well in your lifetime, made their time of existence a little more bearable. Good for you, you’ve done a mitzvot. I say, if you don’t kill anyone and let other people get through the race peacefully, you’re a good person.

Odd that what’s managing to distract me from this crazy life cycle is watching films on death.

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There’s a place called “Vintage Snapshots” that I love. It’s a store that sells old film posters, old records, gramophones (which are always old), etc. The walls are a kind of velvety burgundy color and when you enter it, you feel as though you’ve stepped into a rich lady’s hatbox.

As soon as I was released from work, I made my way over there – it was on the other side of the walking mall. On my right was a guy walking in the same direction. I glanced at him at the same time he glanced at me.

I continued to make my way to the store, trying to either walk slower or faster than him because the store was on the right side and I needed to pass him. In my efforts, I looked over at him again, the same time he happened to look at me confusedly. Then he ducked into “Vintage Snapshots”.

My plans were ruined, at least for as long as he was in there. As a rule of thumb, I refuse to go into the same place as someone I’ve made eye contact with more than once; I’m convinced the person will either think I’m in love with him, I’m stalking him, or I’m stalking him because I’m in love with him. I refused to let any guy wearing cargo shorts believe I was acting on any of the three above three options.

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