I was looking at earrings at a jewelry stand on State Street outside the student union. As I browsed, I became aware of a voice behind me a few yards away.

“Hi! Can you spare a moment to help out the environment?”

I could tell it was a girl and that I sure as hell was in a college town. When I was walking around Cambridge a couple weeks ago there were scary kids in yellow T-shirts and clipboards lurching around the sidewalks saying, “You�ve got a minute, RIGHT?” I dodged two of them, since I was pretty sure that my out-of-town-just-passing-through-minute would be worthless to their cause and thus wasted. At one point I�d had to turn around and backtrack half a block, which meant I had to pass one of them again, a tall lanky kid. “I knew you�d come back!” he�d said exuberantly. “No.” I�d mumbled, rushing by. But the girl here in Madison wasn�t accosting me. I couldn�t even really see her but as I tried to decide on a pair of earrings I kept hearing her try to engage passerby.

“Hi there! Can you spare a moment to help out the environment?”

(Silence and footsteps)

“Hi! Can you spare a moment to help out the environment?”

(Muttered, noncommittal reply)

“Okay! Hi! Can you spare a moment to help out the environment?”

I handed the earrings I�d chosen to the jewelry vendor, who wrote the receipt slowly. Someone had stopped to help out the environment. From what I could hear, the environment required a monthly debit amount from a checking account. Someone would think about it.

“Yeah, that�s fine!” I heard the girl call after him or her.

Then she said, “Hi! Can you spare a moment to help out the environment?”

The vendor gave me my earrings and pointed out some necklaces that were twenty percent off. I started examining some silver pendant.

“Hi there! Spare a moment to help out the environment?”

I decided to buy a necklace, too.

“Hey!” Environment Girl said suddenly. Her voice was different. I froze and was afraid to turn, because for a moment I thought she was talking to me. “So guess where I am,” she said, and then I realized she was on her cell phone. “I�m on State Street,” she told her friend on the phone. “I�m doing that job? Yeah.”

I tried to catch the name of the organization she was working for, but the jewelry vendor was counting out my change.

“�Yeah. Classes are out now. (Pause.) I�m by the bookstore? (Pause.) Yeah. The thing is? I think? Um, this job makes me totally want to shoot myself. Seriously.”

I looked at the jewelry lady to see if she was listening, too, but she was busy writing another receipt.

“I mean, my God,” the girl went on. “This sucks so bad.”

***

I�m back from Wisconsin now. I didn�t get a chance to take many photos, but I�ll post the few that I have this weekend.

And if you’ve been by the book site, you’ve noticed you�ll get a chance to see me three times this weekend: 1.) 7:00 pm Saturday for a short reading at at Book Cellar in Lincoln Square 2.) 12:30 pm Sunday for a reading at The Printers Row Book Fair and then 3.) 2:00 pm Sunday at the fair I’ll be doing a memoirs panel with Paula Kamen and Amy Krouse Rosenthal. Come see me! It’s for the environment! Okay, so it’s not, but for the sake of that poor girl, PRETEND IT IS.

The Redeye article where Flea and I are interviewed is most likely going to come out Monday. But you can read about Ron in the New York Times today. I’m happy that they ran one of my favorite photos from his site.

I was sad to hear that Alicia Frantz passed away on Friday. I’d linked to her Audible Frequency blog a couple years ago, and I’d met her a couple times only in passing, but her site was one of the most interesting weblogs in Chicago. Eric Zorn wrote a wonderful tribute to her on his Chicago Tribune blog and I recommend listening to the strange and moving radio noise recording featured on Gapers Block this week. (Chris, I bet you’d like this. I wish I could have introduced you to her.)

I’m leaving now to drive up to Milwaukee, with an iPod full of songs and a mix tape (an actual cassette tape I can’t wait to listen to.

See you tonight, Wisconsin. I just might read my story from this book.

I’m back in Chicago now. I’ve been home since Wednesday night, but it took going through the stacks of mail and all the other crap that accumulated over the past few weeks to feel like I was really home home, and not just shuffling through a familiar landscape of laundry piles and receipts and business cards (am I the only person who doesn’t know what to do with other people’s cards? Where do I put them? Should I put them in a bowl and have a monthly drawing and send the winner a nice gift certificate to Sizzler? I deliberated this as I went through the cards and about five hundred thousand other pieces of paper today.). But now everything is in its place and so am I.

I stayed in four different hotels on this last trip. I have a recurring bad dream about missing the check-out time. I collected all the complimentary shower caps from the bathrooms. I don’t know why. I have this idea I can use them like these things, which I would never buy. That’s how homesickness makes you weird, I guess: I began to imagine this domestic existence covering big bowls of homemade salads, even though I’ve spent the past three months or subsisting on handfuls of dry cereal and frozen burritos from Trader Joes. But it looks like I’ll be home long enough this time that it might be possible to have a legitimately kitchenlike experience in my own kitchen. Theoretically, at least.

I updated the book site. Go there! Be informed! Wisconsin is next.

I’m in a coffeehouse in Chelsea uploading some photos to the Flickr page. I know this is making me sound even more like the kind of dopey hipster kid that that Seattle Weekly review made me out to be. Please know that I am the stodgiest person in this coffeehouse, the least prettiest, and I think the only female, too. In a few minutes I have to go back to my hotel and get ready to do some more media stuff. The stupid Yahoo Weather forecast said it was going to be raining all week but holy crap, it is beautiful this afternoon. I have to log off once the photos are done uploading and I don’t know if I’ll be able to get back on before the reading tonight BUT YOU’RE COMING, RIGHT? TO BARNES & NOBLE ASTOR PLACE? PRETTY PRETTY PLEASE COME YES YES? Whew. And pass it on, too.

I hate the key situation. I hate not having keys. It’s not until I travel that I realize how compulsively necessary it is for me to be able to reach for and clutch and stash and dig out my big jangly set of keys. I especially hate that one of the first things I have to do when I leave to go on a trip is bury my keys deep in my bag and pretend they don’t exist for however many days I’m gone. I hate reaching in to find them when I’m almost home and worrying that they’ve suddenly ceased to exist. I hate that when I travel my reassuring handful of keychain is traded for a plastic hotel key card. A card! How the fuck am I supposed to trust a card? It’s barely three dimensional. I put it in my purse and I can practically feel the universe threaten to suck it through any one of its slot-shaped wormholes back into total oblivion.

I do not like that most hotels seem to have Pepsi and not Coke machine. Diet Pepsi in a plastic bottle for $1.50 or more is three kinds of wrong, and it tastes like chemicals and exile.

I wish there was only one kind of alarm clock. Or only one kind for all the hotels in the world. The one this morning had TWO alarm settings and to the best of my ability to decipher the configurations of buttons and light-up dots I thought I’d set them both, but only one went off. I had a wake-up call and I got up anyway, but still, doubt lingers like a fart. Also, how does the “sleep” button work and who are these people who use it? Also, why is the default alarm setting always on radio mode, and why is it always tuned in at the most ragged edge of an AM frequency, at full volume, spraying big blurts of static and unintelligible newstalk? I keep waking up to what sounds like air traffic controllers attacked by bees.

I like those little folding stands that you use to hold up your luggage. I never used to understand the point of using them, but now in every hotel room I find the stand and open it and haul my suitcase up on it and I feel like a very savvy traveler for some reason.

I think I am seriously dyslexic or otherwise cognitively impaired when it comes to reading those signs in hotel hallways, i.e., “Rooms 301-319 –>” The numbers! The arrows! The greater than/less than propostions! Two out of three times I always start out walking in the wrong direction.

I like that I am writing this entry from the Limoliner going from Boston to New York. I checked, and I’m pretty sure that I’m only the 416th person to write a damn blog entry from the Limoliner. Really, it’s the pimpingist bus ever. It doesn’t have that toilet chemical smell that Amtrak trains totally have, either.

I have new pictures up on the Flickr page. Most of them are of Boston, with a couple of cameraphone pics of the day I spent in Nashua. Note to New Hampshire residents: I’m sorry that the only photos of your state are of a hotel and a gift shop, but I’m afraid that’s all I got to see in the very short time I was there. Only a few precious moments there, really.

We just passed a sign for Squantz Pond State Park. Where is that? Are we almost there?