in the morning, in the bathroom, you will find me "Tao Lin" off

I don't like going to American Apparel. It makes me feel poor and un-"trendy." Their mannequins fill the glass window-displays next to the bus stop across the street from the used bookstore that has the cats in it and instead of doing the whole awkwardly-shuffle-wait-and-feign-checking-my-cellphone-and-pretend-to-read-my-book sometimes I'll (regretfully) go inside until the metro comes. This is always a mistake. There is so much spandex and neon, and they always put the nicest stuff upstairs so you have to stay longer; have to make the trek up there and in an unhurried-enough, time-consuming way so as to look "casual." There'll always be, like, one shirt I'm interested in, but it's always $40 or more. I'm not a "career-woman;" I don't have that big of (or rather: any) disposable income and so I'll say, "Fuck this shit, Goodwill works for me," and go back outside and resume not-making-eye-contact.

But I can see why Tao Lin would title a book Shoplifting from American Apparel. I can see why a person would do that. If I had the skills, I'd do it. Clearly I don't because I am constantly running out of money from not having it in the first place and from spending all that I do have on goods that could otherwise be stolen. Obviously, I am not a master in the art of petty theft because I am writing this instead of going to the nearest Barnes & Noble and slipping Tao Lin's novella into the secret-inside-pocket of my "dad jacket" that makes me kind of look like Daria. I regret having started-to-read Les Misérables at so young an age, as I fear it has instilled in me a great terror of getting caught wrong-doing by the authorities, and this makes the ability to truly shoplift a personal impossibility.

One time while at Barnes & Noble I wanted to buy Miranda July's No One Belongs Here More Than You. I asked the info-desk man about it because none were on the shelf. He looked it up on his computer-monitor from the early-aughts and said that there were some in stock and led me back to where I had just come from. But I know my alphabet, and I know my way around a bookshelf, and even when this khaki-slack-donning man knelt down and scanned spine-to-spine, there were still no copies physically there. Apparently, going by what the man told me, a lot of Miranda July books went missing this way. I wonder about that sometimes, about what kind of "status" goes with being an author hip to the type of demographic that wants to read your work but doesn't want to pay for it; whether those "sales" still make the publisher money; whether this practice discourages book stores from carrying the kinds of books that I like to read.

I like Tao Lin a lot, though, so I pay for his books. But I still buy them used from amazon because I am cheap.

I learned what a chode was the day I "discovered" Tao Lin. I "found" him, "by accident" in the newspaper. I then forced my friends to read the Stranger article he had written (I still have the pull-out; it's yellowing a bit, but well-preserved in my towering, file-cabinet-topping newspaper stack). We sat in a grassy area outside and no one was really paying attention. I tried to get people to read parts out loud but I think it probably ended up being just me. I laughed multiple times per paragraph and Jacob and Jake and Zanzibar and Katy and Demi pulled grass up by its roots. I miss those friends. I lived in Seattle then. Now I live in Iowa.

Moving to college here naturally made me fear that I would become that one character (Greg) from that one story ("Suburban Teenage Wasteland Blues") in Bed, and that I would just "forget to make friends" during my tenure at university. Surprisingly, that hasn't exactly happened (though with my winning personality and tender good looks a person can't really predict what will happen by graduation). But sometimes, still, I get confused and (secretly) think that I am a character in a Tao Lin novel. Or that those characters are me. Or maybe even that I am Tao Lin but that would be stretching it on account of the fact that I'm not Asian or male and didn't grow up in Florida.

I like the desolateness in his characters' ways of thinking, though. I like the realism and randomness and prevalence of existential crises.

I worked at a movie theater and there were several positions that didn't really require any work to be done. If you were an "usher" you'd have to walk fast and you'd sweat a lot and probably get some amount of diet coke slopped all over your white dress-shirt sleeves. If you were "doing concessions," there'd inevitably be a manager lurking somewhere nearby, and the task of dealing with customers and making their shit actually required some paying-of-attention; same went for working in the box-office. The other jobs, however, were pretty much stand-there-for-eight-hours-while-making-eight-eighty-an-hour kind of posts. One of these was "IMAX door," where you had to check people's tickets when they went in to the "IMAX" theater because those tickets cost more money than others and the management didn't want people sneaking in. But because there is really only a thirty-minute window surrounding the start of a movie during which people generally enter a theater, and whoever came up with that position was probably mildly retarded, doing "IMAX" meant, essentially, getting paid to read your novel of choice. I always carry books or at least a Believer or something with me, in case somebody goes to the bathroom or I have to take a bus or something, but some people don't. At my job, at the movie theater, they didn't tell you beforehand what post you were going to get that day, and so sometimes people would have a long eight hours of standing next to a doorway with not really very much to do (electronic devices were contraband). One of my "work-friends" there, Jason, experienced this phenomenon. But I guess I was feeling weirdly nice that day and offered him the tome I was currently toting around with me. It was Gravity's Rainbow. When I came back at the end of his shift to reclaim it, I expected a complaint or some joke about my terrible taste in modern fiction, but Jason confessed that he'd actually been reading the book, and had actually enjoyed it (I have still yet to entirely finish a Pynchon novel). We continued like this, us co-workers, me lending him a read whenever he got assigned to do "IMAX." I entrusted him with The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay and Slaughterhouse-Five and Maus (don’t worry, we noted the Holocaust predominance), and then one day I happened to be re-reading Eeeee Eee Eeee. When I went to go pick it up a few hours later, Jason looked at me rather suspiciously.

"Have you read this book before?" he asked.

"Uh, yeah," I said.

"Um… is the guy who wrote this insane?"

I felt awkwardly embarrassed, but still admitted that it was one of my favorite books; that I highly identified with the protagonist and basically think the way that he does.

"You think about beating people with lead pipes? And going on killing rampages?" Jason asked. "You think about beating Elijah Wood to death? …That is possibly the worst book I've ever read."

I didn't lend any more books to Jason after that incident. He eyed me kind of warily. We had one running joke about Hayden Panettiere and Tiger Cruise that kind of died; another that required me to be able to do a good Obama impression that never got finished. I ran into him at a Starbucks once but we didn't talk to each other even though we were sitting close enough for an outdoor-voice kind of conversation. Then I moved to Iowa.

Instead of working at movie theaters or libraries, sometimes I want, in a very vague way, to be a pizza delivery person. I want this in the same way that I want to drive a taxi, or a bus, or work at a lamp store. If I fulfilled this pizza-business desire, then I would be that one step closer to wholly becoming Andrew in Eeeee Eee Eeee (five, three, four; count it on your fingers as you say it to make sure you've gotten the durations right), but when thinking of this, I then remember that I can't drive. The DMV, I guess, must be a place where dreams are realized.

The other day I covertly slipped Eeeee Eee Eeee onto my boyfriend's desk because he hadn't read it and I think, at times, that it is a good representation of my psyche and my mental processes and why I find Elijah Wood so hilarious (Yo Gabba Gabba could not have picked a better puppet-master). When my boyfriend got back to his apartment after his job was over for the day, he text-messaged me, "You're a goof," presumably because he saw the book sitting on top of his laptop, but a myriad of other reasons (my proclivity for man-shirts and children's VHS tapes; my "buffalo brows;" my inability to shut the fuck up) could have come into play. I text-messaged back, "That's me!" and then finished re-reading Sideways Stories from Wayside School. As you can imagine, it was a pretty good day.