Lisa

I just found this story about Lisa from last fall in the Daily Iowan.

More than 10 years after the deadly protest, Weaver was the sole correspondent reporting with a live
video-phone feed from China on the Hainan spy-plane incident during the standoff between China and the
United States over the mid-air crash between the nations’ planes. That’s when authorities arrested her on live
television.
But Weaver shrugs it off.
“That’s nothing. That just happens,” she said, noting that she’s been detained in China “lots of times.”

That kind of modesty makes people who wish they were as cool as you just want to give up.

Hell, I don't care if she thought Alese was hot shit or if she never emailed in response to my post card. Chatham is so not the same without fawning over her. And I still curse the fact that I signed up for her International Journalism so late that I missed most of her Tienanmen Square talk. I never got the full story of what she was doing in '89.

Also, why is this yet another story about Lisa that's really blandly written?

But, as the tall and thin
woman said, she didn’t intend to go into broadcast journalism.

What is this, a wanted poster? Tall and thin woman?
What I wouldn't have given for an excuse to pester Lisa outside of class. If she had been here for 20 years since Tienanmen, that plus Chinese Chatham students could have been a killer story. Certainly a little more so than one of our Deans we had for three years is leaving, here's a puff piece.

But somehow all the sub-par writers in the world always get to interview her first.

Lousy Iowa.

A.

While listening to old Against Me! and after reading old Mitch Clem comics, I was reminded of A., my sister's friend. Was she her roommate, briefly? I think so. This fades, and it wasn't even that long ago.

But it was in the middle of no, no, school. I can't go to college. I want to be some bad-ass. Some Christopher McCandless punk. Some runaway trainhopper. I wanted to live with my underage best friend cousin in some terrible squat in Montana. If there is such a thing. I wanted to not do what I was doing then. I wanted my life to be active and creative and bold. It was none of those things. I was frozen. Entirely terrified. Jealous of everyone who seemed powerful or confident in ways I wanted in myself.

So there's A., from Minnesota. She wore no make-up. Her face all sort of blended together. She was not pretty, but I had to focus to remember that. Her accent was her most prominent aesthetic.

She needed surgery. My mother had told her to call if she needed anything. She hadn't had it yet in the day we hung out. I remember being in Squirrel Hill. We were waiting for my sister for some reason. I seem to remember going to a shoe store, and A and I both being bored very quickly.

So A. just talked and talked. She spent 3 months in Brazil alone. She once hitched a ride through the Northern Midwest with Against Me! Her friends and her built a raft to sail down the Mississippi for a while. She had done it all, and she was tired of it already. She eluded to bad things having maybe happened to her. Maybe threats, or close calls, maybe some real, terrible thing. She was sick of her friends who could only talk about their glory days. She wanted stability after all her adventures. That was the part I ignored.

She was perfect. She was who I wanted to be so desperately. She had no interest in being admired. She was friendly to me for that one day, a good talker, but that was all. She had her surgery, I believe it turned out fine. She went back home to Minnesota. She sings in a sweet, pure old time sort of voice and plays the washtub bass.