Backpacking through the Years

For the last six years I’ve had a constant friend. A friend who smoothly transitioned with me from high school to college, and who always had my back.

I’m talking about my corduroy Jansport backpack. The backpack that clung dedicatedly to my shoulders through most of my teenage years. And now it’s heaving a final, exhausted sigh. One of its straps has been knotted so many times that the most dedicated boy scout could never unravel it. An ever-widening hole spreads through the front pocket, and a wad of radio-actively green gum has only been half-heartedly scraped from the back. In short, it’s about to stop completing any of its important roles as a backpack.

It should come as no surprise that I easily attach to inanimate objects. In my bedroom, I still have an entire mesh hammock full of beanie babies. But if I was to build a museum of my life, my backpack would earn its own rotating display case.

I bought it freshman year of high school. Out of all the things I purchased at 14, there are very few I don’t regret. Beyond the heavy eyeliner and My Chemical Romance t-shirts that dominated my freshman year, my backpack waited patiently, knowing it would outlast all the fads.

High school is, in essence, a terrible time. That doesn’t mean that I personally had a terrible in high school. It just means now, two years later, I can recognize that we were all hormonal, pimply, overdramatic teenagers.

In those four years of turning into functioning adults, we wasted a lot of time on trivial things. A favorite activity of my group was taking pictures of ourselves to post on our MySpaces. We definitely weren’t the only teenagers obsessed with photographing ourselves. What is it about being sixteen that causes this frenzy to pout your lips, hold the camera out at arm’s length and snap your own face? Was it a desperate need to prove our own existence, to hold a concrete image of ourselves as our friends, our bodies, our lives changed around us? Or were we just hoping that the perfect default photo would finally make that homeroom hottie notice us?

All through those four years, my backpack hugged my shoulders with constant reassurance. It graciously held my textbooks in the hall, my water bottles at concerts, and my paperbacks on the train. And when I went to college, I packed it to bursting with knickknacks to decorate my dorm shelves with. On my first night of freshman year, when I hung my Harry Potter poster over my bed and worried over the team-building games I’d be forced to play the next day, my backpack waited calm and reassuring on its hook by the door. It’s always been there, silent and useful, and now it’s about to disintegrate for good.

I can’t help but feel this backpack represents me. Six years of an ever-changing array of band pins, iron-on patches, stains and rips—in essence, the entire process of growing up. I’m not sporty nylon, I don’t have a built-in water bottle holder, and I’m no good at hiking or braving the wilderness. I’m corduroy—unassuming and a tad nerdy, a fabric to last through the years.

How do you say "embarassment" in French?

If I seem worldlier when you see me, it’s thanks to my recent J-term trip jet setting through Paris, Prague, Berlin and Amsterdam with a ragtag group of Elmhurst students. When I dreamed of myself in Europe, imaginary-me was incredibly stylish and nonchalant. Of course I would be wearing a dark trench coat and drinking coffee in Paris, or smoking a cigarette while staring moodily over Amsterdam’s glittering canals. It didn’t ever occur to me that I don’t smoke, rarely drink coffee, and don’t even own a trench coat.

My plans on being fashionable were mercilessly crushed in Paris. French women are not only impossibly slim and posh, but each one has mastered the art of cool indifference that makes them seem like the kind of women who have never worn pajama pants in public or eaten a microwave burrito. In short, I clomped through Paris like a rhinoceros in a thrift store t-shirt.

Any plans of European assimilation scattered like a flock of Parisian pigeons (the most fashionable birds in the world.) The longer we stayed in the City of Love, the more I felt like a bumbling Midwesterner. Everything gave me away, from my booming laugh to my scuffed sneakers. Even my conversations suddenly sounded like the dialogue from a King of the Hill episode. “Well, gol-dang, is that the Mona Lisa? This is just like the Da Vinci code, y’all!” I might as well have been draped with the American flag wherever I went.

Two years of high school French didn’t prepare me very well at all for my five days in Paris. Thankfully, I remembered how to order a ham sandwich, which has been proven to be the most useful survival phrase in any language.

I fared a bit better in Germany. After a few days, I mastered how to say “good morning,” “thank you” and “I would like some tap water.” In general, I fit in a bit better in Germany, whose culinary pinnacles involve filling one kind of meat with another meat. Germans are a bit more substantial than the French, so I no longer felt like a wooly mammoth crashing through a tea party. The only time I really felt alienated was when an elderly woman behind the counter at a bakery began screaming at me in rapid German as I tried to pay. When I couldn’t understand what someone was saying to me, I usually resorted to nodding and smiling. Grinning maniacally and jerking my head up and down fast enough to dislodge my brain, I piled Euros on the counter until she stopped screeching—anything to free me from her sudden explosion of rage.

Thankfully, I wasn’t on my own as I made a fool of myself across the European Union. Nothing forms friendships as solidly as stress, and the chaos of navigating four foreign cultures means my classmates and I are basically bonded for life. Navigationally, I can rattle off “Never eat soggy waffles,” but my inner GPS does me no good. Luckily, most of my group members could proficiently decipher maps, and they allowed me to follow after them like an oversized toddler. They could have easily ditched me somewhere in Prague, and I’d still be stumbling around trying to figure out how to convert koruna into dollars (I still have no idea how much money I blew in Prague).

Also thankfully, I was not only paired with a great group of kids, but a group who supported me when I inexplicably decided to talk with a Benjamin Button accent for 24 hours. Jet lag does strange things to people, and before long we were all resorting to strange ways to pass the time. In Paris, we bonded over a “draw the best beard” completion. In Prague, we built an epic fort from hotel sheets and curtains. And in Berlin, when we accidentally bought cookies instead of crackers, we topped them with cheese anyway.

Europe was astounding, beautiful and life-changing, but I’m not sure I could ever live there. I like knowing the secrets to the local Goodwill, and I much prefer our saccharine-sweet Diet Coke to Europe’s imposter Coke Light. The first thing I did when I arrived home, after hugging my parents, was head to Taco Bell. And somehow, the greasy faux-Mexican fast food tasted just like America to me.

Tick Tock on my Maternal Clock

My maternal instinct kicked in recently. I don’t actually want to have a baby. Mostly I just want to look at them, and occasionally hang out with them. My Google habits have been altered, too—instead of the ever-popular “puppies playing” image search, I’ve sneaked in a “babies in costumes” search. You’ve never known true happiness until you see an infant dressed as a slice of pizza.

Times have definitely changed how we look at proper mothering ages. Right now, I’m mostly concerned with being an independent college student (this means I limit calling my mom to twice a week). If I lived in the Old West, I’d probably already have a cabin full o’ rowdy pioneer kids. I’d also know how to shoot buffalo. I base my knowledge of pioneer life solely off of Little House on the Prairie books.

Maybe I can just guilt one of my siblings into having a kid. “Aunt” is probably the best position, anyway, because you get visitation rights but can give the baby back as soon as it poops or starts crying. I don’t want to have to deal with any real baby problems. Mostly I’m just in it for the peek-a-boo. Unfortunately, I already think I’d be a painfully unhip aunt, given that my pop culture knowledge wanes around 1999. “Hey kids, remember Catdog? Want to come over to Aunty Megan’s and play some N64?” By now, N64 is the equivalent of Atari, and Catdog might as well be Steamboat Willie.

My sister is married and owns a house, which seems very adult even though she has a cat named after an Invader Zim character—I could probably convince her to pop one out. My brother is problematic, though. He’s a high school junior, so I guess I don’t really want him to play the Michael Cera in Juno role.

So I guess for I’ll just fulfill my mothering instincts with other people’s offspring. I’m just hoping someone will let me name their baby. I’m really good at naming things. I have a houseplant called Salvidor, and if you sat and talked to him for a minute you’d realize the name is spot-on. Is there a career option for naming other people’s babies?

Maybe someday I’ll be ready for my own personal baby, but I’m not sure if anything could prepare me for the actual birthing process. The good news is that I’ve devised a solution. When I’m finally a mature, prepared adult, I’ll hit up a shopping mall and just steal a baby. Just grab a stroller and start running. If you’re gonna put your baby on wheels, I’m gonna take it as an invitation.

Those child leashes make more sense now. It’s not to stop the kids from getting in trouble, but to protect them from me. Good thing I have scissors.

Of course, publishing this plan might pose some problems. I’m pretty sure this is grounds for a restraining order from Baby GAP. Still, I’m free for babysitting!

Doggone It

I’ve been homesick lately, though not the knife-in-the-gut Freshman year variety. Instead, I miss the small things—the Picasso poster on my bedroom wall, or the Tribune crossword puzzle spread across the breakfast table. But most of all, with a constant ache in the cavern of my chest, I miss my dog.

Sammi is my best friend for the sole reason that she is boundlessly willing. She doesn’t care if I’m having a bad hair day or if I haven’t showered or if I’m screaming obscenities because Facebook chat has crashed for the 96th time that night. No matter what, she still wants me to scratch her butt.

I was the sort of kid who slept with mountains of stuffed animals, and kept even more invisible pets floating around like phantoms at a pet cemetery. My parents tolerate animals, even like them to a degree, but when I started packing for college they realized that I was ditching them with two surly cats and a sloppy lab mix who once opened the fridge door, devoured an entire turkey, and buried the evidential bones in a houseplant. Clearly the animals were all my idea.

I miss Sammi the most because she misses me the most. The cats treat me with cool indifference most of the time, and my brother barely pulls his attention away from his X-Box. My parents miss me, but I can’t whip them into a pee-inducing fervor when I walk through the door (which is, for the record, a good thing.) Nobody wears enthusiasm as well as a dog, especially a dog who hasn’t seen you in a matter of months.

Keeping dogs as pets is a strange phenomenon. Sammi has enough bulk to kill me if she really wanted, but she’s more interested with sneaking onto the couch for a nap. Our pets have come a long way from their proud wolf ancestors (especially my friend Eva’s dog, Phineas, who is essentially a glorified guinea pig on speed.)
Still, the historic bond seems natural—a constant buddy to sit by the fire with, to hunt the Wooly Mammoth beside, to throw the tennis ball to until your arm detaches itself from your shoulder.

So yeah, I miss Sammi. When I see anyone in Elmhurst walking their dog, I can’t tear my eyes away. “Ooh, can I pet your dog?!” I sometimes can’t resist asking, hands shaking like an addict craving a fix. What I really want to ask is “Oooh, can I borrow your dog for a couple hours?” We’d have such fun frolicking through the college mall, bounding after Frisbees and wagging out tails. For some reason, people will never hand over the leash. What we really need is a Rent-a-Pup station where needy college students can get their canine companion fill.
I’ve never met any dog owner who wasn’t passionate to talk about their pet. I trade dog stories the way some people trade Pokemon cards. And one thing’s for certain: everyone thinks that their dog is the smartest, bravest, funniest, and best. And they’re all right.

Sammi isn’t the smartest. She’s not purebred. She strews garbage throughout the house constantly, and goes into barking fits at 3 a.m. when nobody is at the door.
But she loves me the most.

So when I pull into my driveway and hear her joyous howl, I’ll hurry to the front door. We’ll perform the butt-dance of joy as she drenches me in her saliva. Then I’ll know I’m truly home.

Like Riding a Bike

Megan Kirby
“You don’t forget how to ride a bike,” everyone scoffed at me. “That’s one of those things you only have to learn once.” Still, I had my doubts.
I hadn’t ridden a bike since the 8th grade, when my supposed best friends led me miles and miles from home only to abandon me in the wilderness of the Oswego bike trail when I grew too sluggish.

So bicycles and I don’t share the fondest past. Still, everyone deserves a second chance. Plus, I got a bike for free courtesy of Elmhurst College. When I’m offered something free, I will always accept. If there was a booth handing out rabid Doberman Pinschers, I’d be first in line with my collar and squeak toy.

My bike might as well be a violent canine, for all of the danger it puts me in. The only reason most students will wear their helmets is because they signed an agreement to protect their skulls. I wear mine because without it I would definitely die. Everything poses a threat: cracks in the sidewalk, passing cars, low flying birds.

Still, there is something inherently cool about a bike. Maybe it’s that first taste of independence left over from when you strapped on your streamers and pedaled away from mom and dad for the first time. Of course, you returned 7 minutes later with skinned knees, but it’s easy to forget that part.

Plus, bikes are eco-friendly, which instantly makes them hip. Whenever I go into Chicago, I see all kinds of extremely cool looking people riding bikes. In the city, urban hipsters use bikes as their sole mode of transportation. They lean their bikes against their beds at night so they can coast to the kitchen the next morning. If I planned to ever reach this level of trendiness, I knew I had to start pedaling.

Still, I was too embarrassed to let anyone see me wobble down the sidewalk. So one afternoon I set out alone, intent on exploring the neighborhoods of Elmhurst while relearning how to ride my bike. In an attempt to make my helmet look cooler, I slapped a handful of pterodactyl stickers to the plastic dome before setting off.

Apparently, you don’t really forget how to ride a bike after all. But you do forget how to turn. I discovered this as I toppled into a bush, meeting the disapproving glare of an elderly man across the street with a leaf blower. When you’re 9 you get sympathy, when you’re 19 you get disdain.

Righting myself, I examined my battle scars: a series of tiny scratches on my right arm. It looked like I battled an army of kittens. Teetering back on my path, I realized that my timing was off. In my search for privacy, I headed out just as hoards of teenagers were released from York High School. Not even a dinosaur covered helmet could protect me from the scorn of high schoolers.

Because being passed by minivans on the road proved too terrifying, I mostly zigzagged down the sidewalks, but this meant I had to stop whenever a group of high schoolers ambled by. Of course, stopping a bike is also something you can forget. As I pumped the brakes and lurched to a halt, I smiled broadly at passing teenagers to show them everything was okay. Sometimes, I laughed softly to let them in on the joke.

I didn’t realize how utterly creepy I was until a lone girl passed, listening to her I-Pod. “Ha ha!” I blurted out, trying to prove my sanity as I leered from under my crooked helmet. I don’t think the pterodactyl stickers helped my situation.
My bike’s been locked to the bike rack ever since my afternoon of terrorizing Elmhurst. I hurry past when I walk to classes, trying to escape the guilt that accompanies my neglect. It’s akin to buying a puppy and tying it up in the backyard as soon as you get home. Bikes are meant to be ridden, but I am not meant to ride bikes.

If you hear the lonely crank and squeak of gears late at night, it’s probably just my bicycle begging for attention. I’ll hurriedly lace up my sneakers, head out into the night, and go on a nice, long walk to escape the reminders of my failure. I hope I don’t run into that I-Pod girl again.

This Little Piggy Went Home

They’re not testing for swine flu anymore. I learned this at the doctor’s office, after they jammed a swab up my nasal cavity and effectively punctured my brain. Apparently, they can still torture you with satanic tests, but they can’t tell you why you’re sick. If they’re not testing anymore, where are the news shows getting all these statistics that say swine flu is the coming of the apocalypse?

When I was healthy, getting sick seemed like fun. A few days to chill on the couch, drink apple juice and watch TV reruns sounds like heaven. When I ended up collapsed in my living room, shaking violently and wearing the same pair of filthy sweat pants for 3 days, it wasn’t such a great time. We need to start taking our sick days when we’re feeling fine. Then they’d be a lot of fun.

When the media first replaced the phrase “swine flu” with “H1N1” I scoffed, but now I understand. Nobody wants to admit they have the swine flu. It sounds dirty and embarrassing. That’s like admitting you get your twisted thrills rolling around in the mud with Miss Piggy. Why don’t we start naming our flus after cool things? Sky Diving Flu has a rebellious edge, and Astronaut Flu sounds just plain cool.

Whatever the flu, though, there’s no way to make the symptoms sound trendy. What were you up to this weekend? Oh, you know, I was just hanging out hacking up putrid mucus and crying pitifully. My list of symptoms pretty much encompassed every awful ache and pain that can accompany an illness. The worst part of the week, however, was my reading choice. Dan Brown’s new thriller The Lost Symbol was more painful than all of my symptoms combined (Wow, that was a snotty joke. Da Vinci Code rules!)

If you ever want to be banished from campus for a week, just mutter “H1N1.” It’s a guaranteed way to make sure people don’t want you around. Want to say no to that date invitation without being awkward? Sorry, I’ve got The Swine. Need a week off of work? Just start coughing and oinking next time you’re in the office.

Getting sick effectively regressed me to the mentality of a first grader. All I wanted to do was watch Nickelodeon shows and have my mom bring me juice boxes. When I was little, I used to watch Little Bear whenever I was sick, and I was ecstatic to find a Little Bear marathon airing on Nick Jr. Little Bear is possibly the most relaxing kid’s show ever produced. For the most part, Little Bear and his buddies meander the forest to a soothing soundtrack. Nothing exciting ever really happens. In one episode, Little Bear sets an entire table—napkins, forks, plates, the whole ordeal. In real life, I would never watch somebody set a table, but if an animated bear is setting the places then I’m mesmerized. In the end, Little Bear is more calming than a meditation session.

After about three days of germ-induced isolation, I realized my social circle had shrunken to include just me and my tabby cat, Tobias. As fun as Toby is, he doesn’t make the best conversation. By the end of the week, my brain became a pile of mush. When I was finally free to come back to campus, I was ecstatic to dive into the piles of schoolwork waiting in my dorm. After finishing the first paragraph of one essay, I was ready to get sick again.

So I’m back just in time to see everyone else leave with their own sicknesses. I was a pioneer of the Elmhurst flu season, but unlike starting a fashion trend, this basically just ostracized me from society. In the end, I’m not sure exactly what sort of sickness I had. For now, I’m just calling it Rock Star Flu.