 |
 |
today the glitterbomber is... |
2002-02-06 no, i haven't forgotten my "places courtney has lived" series. in this installment, i will tell you, my faithful readers, all about the town where i went to college. (WARNING! another long entry! and i will probably ramble on!) first off, i'll just say that i really liked my college, despite it being in the middle of nowhere. i met lots of fabulous people, i got to study abroad, and i got to make up my own major. but "middle of nowhere" describes huntingdon, pa fairly accurately. if you've never had the good fortune of being to central pennsylvania, here's what you need to know: -the towns have weird names, such as "nanty glo" and "mundy's corner" -there are a lot of "sheetz" convenience stores -the residents are white and like to hunt -they also have horrid accents -there is also a lot of incest and KKK members (the two are probably related) you get the picture. huntingdon is a very small town. most people either work for the college or the fiberglass plant. they also like to wear looney tunes clothing and fluorescent colors. (ok, i'm getting mean here. i better quit.) nice things about huntingdon include the pretty mountains, the river, and the cool old houses with stained glass windows. every year i was in college, the river would flood the shopping center that was built next to it. kinda like the nile flooding its banks every year. there were also cool cliffs to climb and sit on (good for throwing rocks at passing trains), and a very pretty peace chapel designed by the same woman who designed the vietnam memorial. huntigdon has stores that sell groceries and firearms! makes it easy to do your shopping, i guess. whenever we'd walk into town, my friends brett and eric would make me and becca go into one such store with them so they could look at the knives and such. becca and i would lurk in the candy aisle while the salespeople gave us all evil looks. my last year and a half at school, i lived in apartments that were owned by the biggest slum lord ever. he was a dairy farmer who was losing so much money that he couldn't afford to pay his workers or feed his cows. he never paid oil companies, either, so he had to try many different ones before he found one who would give him oil. consequently, we often had no heat in the building. luckily, i lived on the 2nd and 3rd floors, so i didn't realize it at first; i usually found out through my friend matt, who lived on the 1st floor and would tell me that he could see his breath because it was so cold. we also received frequent messages from the electric company, telling us that they were going to shut the electricity because you-know-who hadn't paid. the slum lord had quite a plethora of lawsuits against him, as you can imagine. it's too bad the man was such an idiot. i had the coolest apartment my senior year...it was huge and had two floors...and it was cheap. (i had a psychotic roommate, though.) one of our neighbors in the building was an old woman named shirley who had a knack of knowing when you're home and would often come over to bitch about the landlord. she had a horrid smell...a peculiar mixture of BO and lotion. we also had a hardcore whitetrash family living in the house next door. they were always yelling at their kids, who were often wandering outside in diapers. another kid, an 11-year-old, would smoke and swear and ride his bike all over the place. the family had a friend who had a "fear this" sticker on his car and always, always played that nice inch nails song "closer" at top volume on his car stereo. you always knew he was stopping by for a visit when you heard, "i want to fuck you like an animal" in the distance. finally, i called social services on them because i was tired of hearing them yelling at the kids. "are the kids going to school?" social servcies woman asked me. "i don't know," i replied. "i'm in class most of the day. i don't know if some of them are old enough. they're still in diapers." "but are they in school," she still wanted to know. i gave up. then there was floyd. floyd was one of those men in their 50s who are skinny and look like they hang out in pool halls and dive bars, toothpick protruding from mouth, to pick up bleached-blonde women. floyd did odd jobs for the slum lord and lived in the upstairs apartment. he would often have loud arguments with his girlfriend. one morning, the police knocked on my door and asked me if i'd seen him. the crowning glory of my apartment building was the fact that it was haunted. when i first moved in, i shared an apartment with kristen...she had experienced a lot of weird stuff but didn't tell me because she'd thought i'd be scared. one night, we were sitting watching tv when i felt something like a cold draft that didn't move, just stayed by my arm. we often heard footsteps upstairs and the tv blaring when no one was home. the mail would appear on the table inside our apartment. it didn't freak me out too much, but i'm glad nothing paranormal happened when i moved into the another apartement in the building. maybe the ghosts were afraid of my psychotic roommate (not kristen). i've only been back to huntingdon a few times since i graduated college. being back is not the same at all. |
