Why I Love Pigeons

Sometimes I bring up random things that I like that I know many other people generally don't like, or are at least indifferent toward.  Like pigeons.  And every time I bring up something like this, like pigeons, I get all kinds of arguments for why I'm wrong.  When my Latin class took a trip to Italy back in February, we visited St. Mark's Square.  If you've never been there before, you should know that it's FILLED with pigeons.  It's kind of overwhelming.  In college towns, the squirrels are generally uninterested in humans, unless they have food for them.  They are certainly not frightened of them, though, like most small wild animals usually are.  That's kind of like how it is with the pigeons in St. Mark's except there are A BILLION of them.  And if you have anything that even closely resembles something edible, they will be your BEST FRIEND.

Check it:

This is totally normal.

Oh, hi there, little buddy. 

JESUS.

So pigeons.  They're kind of crazy.  But just so you know, I never once got pecked, bitten, chewed on, or otherwise abused by any one of them.  It was totally fine.  It was more than fine.  It was actually pretty fun.  After this expedition with the pigeons, we met back up in a big group with the rest of the class, and I told my teacher, Jason, all about the pigeon adventure.  And you know what he said when he saw these pictures?

"Ew".

"Ew?" I said.  Why "ew", I wondered.

"They're dirty.  Pigeons are just rats with wings."

Remember what I said about bats?  I like them because I like hamsters, and bats are just hamsters with wings.  Well...

I like rats, too.  So if pigeons are just rats with wings, doesn't that make them better?  The answer is yes.  If you disagree, you are free to go.  If, however, you, like I, adore pigeons, read on my good friends.  Read on.

1. Pigeons are smart

In crowded cities (like Venice, or like New York or Chicago) you are likely to see pigeons wandering around.  If you add a park bench or two and a couple of old people, and some bird seed to the equation, 

you get pandemonium.  Or at least a flock of pigeons begging for food.  Since moving to the city I've noticed that most people won't feed pigeons in a public area, at least when there are a lot of people around, because many people find it annoying.  But that doesn't stop people from eating in those public areas, and if you eat something particularly crumbly, like bread or chips, the pigeons will flock to you anyway, and pick your scraps off the ground.  They know you've got food, and they know they can eat it.  But that's not the really clever part.

Today after class I bought a scone at the Barnes and Noble Student Center across the street, then sat down on some benches outside.  There were two pigeons that kept hopping up onto the bench next to me and looking at me with their sad, hungry, pigeon eyes, begging me for food.  But I didn't want to bother the people next to me, so I ignored them, and they went away.  But then a third pigeon showed up.  I noticed him because he was hopping around on one foot.

"Oh, poor guy," I thought.  "He's injured."  And with a quick glance to make sure there were no other pigeons around who would notice my generosity, I bent down and placed a little crumb of my scone on the ground, right near my foot, so I could hide it if some stronger, less-injured pigeon decided to take advantage of his injured brother and snatch it up.  And you know what happened?  The injured pigeon put his goddamned foot on the ground and walked over to the scone crumb, held it in his mouth, then picked his foot back up and looked at me, daring me to make him give it back.  That stupid pigeon was faking an injury to get me to give him food.  And it worked.

I could not stop laughing.  Neither could the old guy next to me.  We just laughed and laughed until the pigeon walked calmly away, then picked his foot up again and hobbled over to his next unsuspecting victim.

2.  Pigeons aren't mean

My family takes a vacation to Maine every summer, and invariably, on at least one day of our vacation, some group of teenage girls next to us decides they want to feed the seagulls.  So they throw a handful of chips on the ground and suddenly there are twenty squawking seagulls flapping their wings at each other and pecking the smaller ones and doing everything they can to make sure they are the ONLY ONES who get to eat today.

While I was watching the pigeons today, I noticed that they don't do that.  First of all, they're much quieter on a whole than seagulls are.  It's "coo, coo" as opposed to "RWAA-AA-AA-AA".  Which would you prefer?  The gentle cooing?  Me too.

There was a guy across from me, talking on the phone and eating a sandwich.  A little piece of lettuce fell and the two pigeons I mentioned earlier both went after it.  Where a pair of seagulls in the same situation would peck and squawk at each other until one of them either dropped the lettuce or escaped with his prize, the pigeons just sat there.  The first pigeon picked up the lettuce, took a bite out of it, then let the rest fall back to the ground while he swallowed his bite.  And while he swallowed his bite, the second pigeon picked up the piece of lettuce, took his bite, then dropped the rest to the ground while he swallowed it.  And this went on, back and forth, until the lettuce was gone.  They just stood there, sharing a scrap of lettuce, like brothers.

3.  They're helpless romantics

Just Google "pigeons love" right now.  Just do it.

There is nothing cuter than animals cuddling.  NOTHING.

On Growing Up

So I'm sitting outside in jeans and a sweatshirt with a scarf wrapped around my face, my hands shoved deep in my pockets, and I'm freezing, when yesterday I was in shorts and a tank-top.  I'm thinking typical troll weather, but then I realize that it's not typical, not really, because "typical" should refer to what I've gotten used to, what I've lived with all my life.  Except now I'm not where I've lived all my life.  It's not far away, so I guess this weather is still typical to the general area, but I still had a tiny pang of loneliness when I realized I'm a fish out of water.

So I decide, hey, it's fall, this is my favorite season, I'm going to make the most of it.  There's a Starbuck's down the street, and it's Pumpkin Spice Latte season, so I decide to take a walk.  On my way I keep passing people who are in flimsy t-shirts and all I'm thinking is how are they not freezing, but then my self-consciousness kicks in and I know they're all judging me because I'm the abnormality here; I'm the only one who's cold.  I pull off my hood and lower my scarf so it's not covering my face anymore, and keep walking.

At the crosswalk, there's a huge crowd of people waiting to walk, so when the light changes, I'm struggling through a crowd of people as I make my way to the revolving doors into the supermarket that shares space with Starbuck's.  I get there just behind someone else, so I have to wait a second for the second compartment to come around, but a woman rounds the corner and slips into the open compartment just as it comes around, so I have to wait for her, too.  She's immediately in front of me as I walk in.  She's walking really slowly, but the checkout lines are crowded and blocking my way on my left, and she's pressed far enough to the shelves on the right that I can't get by that way, either.  Finally I squeeze through, only to be thwarted once more by a pair of older men coming out of the aisle just ahead of me.  Once again, I'm behind slow-movers and trapped on either side.  They turn off down another aisle and I'm free.  The line to Starbuck's is right in front of me, but a woman meandering across my path halts me once more, and while she's passing, a pair of gabbing girls get to the line before me.

So the line's already like ten people long and I'm frustrated by the slowness of the rest of the world, but I made it, and I'm super excited for this Pumpkin Spice Latte to clear away my homesick blues.  So I'm standing there, waiting, thinking about what it's going to be like to drink this delicious thing, and I start to notice something funny.  I feel a little jittery, and I've got kind of a headache.  I start thinking maybe I don't really want this latte anymore, but I'm already in line, so I have to.  I'll just get a small.  Even as this thought crosses my mind, though, I know I just can't take the caffeine.  So I give up.  I turn around and head out, getting out of the supermarket and across the street with no mishaps.

I'm walking back to my dorm, thinking about what just happened, and why the prospect of something so delicious was so off-putting to me.  Then it hits me:  It's my boyfriend.

We weren't a perfect match at first.  In fact, I called it off with him twice because I didn't think we meshed well.  But even then, when we were awkwardly dating and only seeing each other at lunch on Tuesdays and Thursdays because he had his college classes and I had play rehearsals on the weekends, I was happy.  I was happy because it was fall, and I was happy because I was in the throes of "new love".  Even if you're not happily in love, you can be happy in love.  Apparently.

But that was almost a year ago now.  Since then we've gotten to know each other better, and now I'm very happily in love, at least as much as I can be at my tender young age.  But I'm not happy in love.  Like I said before, I'm not at home right now.  But he is, still.  He's about five hours away from me, and even though it's not far, it's a hassle—not to mention expensive—to get back home to see him, so I have to suffer with it for now.

So I'm walking through the Quad, wondering why the hell I'm so cold, and why the hell I didn't want that latte, and why the hell I thought I could deal with being away from everyone I love for so long.

You know how sometimes you hear a song that you listened to a whole lot during a certain period of your life, but you haven't heard it at all since then?  And you get this feeling, whether it be sadness, happiness, loneliness, or what-have-you.  You feel nostalgic.

My boyfriend wasn't allowed to come see me on school grounds during lunch because he wasn't a student at my high school, so we had to meet at the coffee shop across the street.  I never sit in any food-service place without purchasing something from them, even if I'm bringing in my own food, too. Especially if I'm bringing in my own food, too.  So every Tuesday and Thursday last fall I would get out of class and walk across the street to see this boy I hardly knew but was always excited to see because of that new love feeling.  I would set my backpack down at whatever table he was already at, kiss him on the cheek, say "be right back", then go up to the counter and buy...what?

A Pumpkin Spice Latte.

It was almost a relief to realize what was happening.  It was set up so perfectly.  The season is right.  The homesickness is making me lonely.  All it took was the idea of a Pumpkin Spice Latte, and my body reacted.  The problem was not that I'm not in the mood for coffee.  The problem was that I miss my boyfriend.  I miss him enough that re-creating the environment I found myself in during those few fleeting weeks of exciting new love sent a shock through my system that rendered me completely helpless.

I've heard people say that being in love can be scary.  Now I get it.  No one ever seems to want to talk about this, so it might be kind of controversial, but I'm going to try to explain it anyway.  The love itself isn't controversial.  The scary part comes from being without.

Now here's the thing: when a guy tells a girl he needs her, he can't live without her, he wants her to promise to never leave him, there's something funny going on there.  Warning bells go off.  The same thing happens when a girl says these things to a guy, though society views her a little differently than they would view him.  The point, though, is the same.  To a lot of people, phrases like this count this as a symptom of an abusive relationship.

What people don't always realize is that it's only a symptom.  Feeling tired is a symptom of the flu, but isn't it also a symptom of, I don't know, being tired?  Human beings have feelings.  I'm not saying it's okay to feel completely worthless when you're not with the person you love, but it is okay to miss them when you're alone.

Remember that part of the second Twilight book when Edward leaves and there are four pages in a row of just the names of the months passing by, because Bella couldn't do anything without Edward?  That's wrong.  But that's obviously not what's going on with me right now, because I didn't go catatonic the moment I got on the train to come back to school after visiting my boyfriend this weekend.

I guess all I'm trying to say, in this post that ended up way longer than I had originally intended, is that I think maybe I'm growing up.  I'm in a long distance relationship with someone, and I miss him dearly, but I'm still alive, aren't I?  I'm strong enough to take a little bit of heartache and make it part of my daily life.  So I won't be drinking Pumpkin Spice Lattes any time soon.  I'll move past this, because I know, somehow, that I can't be the only one who feels like this.

I don't think my boyfriend's too keen on the drink right now, either.

The Nerve

So I'm in college.  This is my first time ever sharing a room with anyone.  This is my first time ever living in any kind of community housing.  The roommate thing is fine.  It's the community living that makes me nervous.  If you knew me at all through elementary or middle school, or you are part of my family, you know how easy it is to agitate me.  (I neglected to list "high school" there not because I grew a longer fuse, but because I stopped being friends with assholes).  If someone is humming under their breath and I can hear it and it's keeping me from concentrating, I will flip out.

Scratch that.  If someone I know well is keeping me from concentrating, or bothering me in any way, I will flip out.  It has to be someone I know well, because I am fairly confident that they will still love me after I'm done being mad at them.  It's not a good way to live, and I'll probably get ulcers soon, but it's how I am.

Here's the weird thing, though.  If I don't know you well and you're pissing me off, I get really depressed.  It's a chain-reaction thing.  I hear something that bothers me.  I start imagining myself getting out of my chair, walking down the hall and saying in a snarky voice, "can you guys please go somewhere else?  It's 11:00 at night and I'm trying to sleep/I'm trying to study/you're ugly".  But once I get that far, my anxiety gets the better of me.  What if I make her mad?  What if she beats me up?  That's unlikely to happen, sure, and if it does I can probably sue her, so I'm pretty safe.  But what if she's sneakier than that?  What if she want to harm me psychologically because I had the audacity to ask her to turn her music down, or stop screaming at her friend who's standing all the way at the other end of the hall?  What if she tells everyone she knows about this horrible, awful person who one time asked her to be quiet please.  What if she tells her sister, and her brother, and her aunt, and her grandfather, and her hot step-cousin-in-law?  What if I then meet that step-cousin-in-law and his favorite band is Green Day and he snowboards and fences and is really smart and loves to read and is a blogger and buys me sour gummy worms and he's perfect, but then he finds out that I'm that girl, the one who asked his precious step-cousin-in-law, Susie, to stop talking so loud one time, and leaves me?

That's what I told my R.A. when she asked me why I couldn't tell the girl down the hall to shut-up on my own.  She said, "that's a stupid argument".  I know, but I can't keep it from going through my head every time I want to ask someone I don't know to stop sucking.  Here's a better argument: what if the offender is a friend of mine, but not one I've known very long?  What if the offender is someone I like pretty well, but haven't known long enough to know if he'll comply or go on a passive-aggressive Facebook rant about me and hate me forever?

What if the offender is this guy:

He's not talking about me in this status.  He lives in a different dorm.  But he is a friend of mine, one I haven't known for very long but one I intend on keeping.  And he acts like this.  This is why I'm scared to knock on someone's door with a perfectly reasonable request for them to be quieter.  This is the kind of person who lives in my subconscious, judging me every time I tell a boy not to leave his backpack in my room or tell a girl I don't like loaning out pens or tell the guy on the street I don't have time to sign his petition.  This is the kind of person who makes me sad about the world.

This arrogant, angry, the-world-owes-me-everything kind of behavior is becoming more and more common, and I'm not strong enough to fight it, because it scares me.  So, miss R.A., that's why I'm asking you to go do your job and tell the girl down the hall that it's Quiet Hours and she needs to stop screaming.  That's why you need to remind the boys down the hall that they're not not the only human beings in the world, that the universe wasn't built to please them.

I'll just be here, sipping my tea.