I’d heard about the tornadoes that hit Iowa City last week, but it wasn’t until yesterday that I saw photos of the damage. As soon as I saw that that some of the worst hit areas were in my old neighborhood–I lived just up the street from this sorority house–I began to look all over Flickr to see if I could find out what happened to my old place.

For three years I lived on the first floor of an old house a mile off campus. It was perched on a little bluff overlooking a quiet intersection with a brick street. It had two porches, one off each bedroom, and an old-fashioned metal roof. Right after we signed the lease, my roommate and I showed the place to her mother, who declared it a deathtrap for about fifteen different reasons, many of them stupid.

“How are you going to keep people from just climbing in your windows?” she asked. We’ll lock the windows, we told her. She wondered alound if the carpet had mold, the deadly kind. Probably not, we told her. “The bathroom is upstairs? You’re going to fall down those stairs in the middle of the night,” she said. No we won’t, we told her. She was sure the place was filled with mice or termites or radon gas. (It wasn’t.) The floorboards might warp. (So what?) The gasket seal on the refrigerator could be better (The hell?) When she’d finally run out of things to find fault with, she stepped outside with us and peered up at the beautiful old tree in the side yard.

“That tree is going to fall on the house,” she said.

But as it turned out, it fell the other way.

Four jobs I’ve had:

1. Server at university student union coffee stand. Not a “barista.” Nobody called us that back then. No lattes, either, though sometimes people would come up and ask for one and we’d make fun of them after they left.
2. Seasonal sales clerk at Marshall Field’s. When we’d have to leave the salesfloor to go to the bathroom, we had to say to our co-workers, “I’m going to Twenty-Six.” Except I don’t remember what the number was, but whatever the case, you’d say it in order to sound like you were going to some secret department to do fabulously expensive shoe inventory. And not just peeing.
3. Essay test grader at ACT. Another seasonal job. It was a lot like this, actually.
4. College creative writing instructor. I was twenty-three. My students were mostly twenty-one. You can imagine how this went. I made them read that Cynthia Ozick story about the shawl, the dead baby, and the Holocaust, and they made me read their stories about drunk driving tragedies, space zombies, and bestiality.

Four movies I can watch over and over:

1. Bring It On, because this is not a democracy, it’s a cheerocracy.
2. Singin’ in the Rain, which is not just a musical, it’s an amazing spectacular Hollywood circle-jerk of a movie.
3. Fitzcarraldo, which I’ve only seen once, but come on! They drag a steamboat over a mountain! For real!
4. Airplane!

Four places I’ve lived:

1. Oak Park, Illinois.
2. A crumbling old house in Iowa City, Iowa.
3. Another crumbling old house in Iowa City, Iowa.
4. Chicago, Illinois.

Four TV shows I love I’ve loved:
(What’s with the present tense here, silly meme?)

1. That’s Incredible!
2. St. Elsewhere
3. Twin Peaks
4. Cheers, the Shelley Long era

Four places I’ve vacationed:

1. Puerto Vallarta, Mexico.
2. Vancouver, Canada.
3. Somewhere In Jamaica That Requried Us to Drive Two Hours From the Airport On The Wrong Side Of the Road Late At Night And We Almost Hit A Goat And I Cried In the Back Seat.
4. Florida.

Four of my favorite dishes:

1. Pad Kee Mao
2. Macaroni and Cheese
3. New York-style slices
4. Feta and tomato omelets

Four sites I visit daily:

1. Gapers Block
2. My Kinja digest
3. MySpace.com, God help me.
4. Flickr

Four places I would rather be right now:

1. Lake Michigan, because then I would be like, “Hey you! I’m a Great Lake! Splish splash, suckas!” and get to hang out with the U.P.
2. Or I could be the Mall of America and be all, “Kiss my ass! I’ve got three roller coasters in my belly! A wedding chapel! An aquarium!”
3. Ooh, what if I was Google? Does that count as a place? How would that work?
4. Maybe I’m not understanding the question right.

I was tagged by Kevin. Blame him.