So, it’s been a minute since I’ve posted, and there’s a reason for that. Friday night I had my first official run-in with the Cedar Rapids Police Department, which, for the record, is my first run-in with cops EVER. When I say that I was the golden child in high school, I mean it. I didn’t drink, I didn’t smoke, I kept my grades up and the latest I stayed up was 1 in the morning, and I thought myself angsty because of it.

I really, really wish I could tell you a story that will make my almost arrest seem so much more badass than it was. Unfortunately, the story behind this is arguably one of the most boring moments of my life, and I’m a little devastated because of it. On Friday, I went to my classes, played badminton for an hour, got my hair dyed (and payed an obscene amount money to do so), and went to an improv show with my friend Zane. Now, this all seems very mundane, which it should, because it was. After the improv show, Zane and I went back to his house to hang out for awhile, and our friend Katelynn met us there, they had a glass of wine each (I stayed sober, DD) and then we all went back to Coe, from which Zane went to a local bar & grill, Uptown Live, and Katelynn and I went to mine to get dressed before going anywhere. About 20-30 minutes later, Katelynn and I decided to walk over to Uptown to check on Zane, who’s been going through some pretty serious relationship shit lately and is as emotionally stable as your average middle-aged, white Femi-Nazi named Linda, and a little less than 10 minutes (TEN MINUTES) after she and I walked in the door, as we were quite literally walking out the door to go home, the CRPD flooded the place and pulled anyone under the age of 21 within reach and started the interrogations.

I’ll be honest, my attempts to understand the US government and laws is very much like a member of the National Federation of Republican Women trying to understand what was wrong with Ahmed Mohamed’s arrest – it just doesn’t work. When the officer talking to me and Katelynn began throwing legal terms at us about what we were being charged with and how we had to go about sorting out those charges, I had to do deep breathing challenges to avoid punching her in the throat out of frustration. I had to interrupt her and be completely honest, explaining that I’m not from around here and that she was going to have to ‘For Dummies’ this for me. What I gathered from her elementary explanation is that the law I’d violated stated that anyone under the age of 21 cannot be in a licensed establishment whose main source of income is the sale of alcohol past 9 PM in the city of Cedar Rapids. I’ve spent hours looking for this law through multiple online searches and going through the Iowa laws applying to alcohol, and the closest thing I can find to this law is this:

“It is legal for those under 21 to be in licensed establishments. However, localities may have ordinances making it locally illegal.”

WHERE THE FUCK DO I FIND THESE ORDINANCES? Apparently, the average citizen living in Cedar Rapids is supposed to just know these things, and I don’t fit the bill for the average citizen. How the hell is this supposed to be known if they don’t make it readily available knowledge? They weren’t carding. I’ll repeat, they weren’t carding. If the establishment isn’t carding, and is advertised for food and drink, what’s obvious about this rule? Absolutely fucking nothing.

So I’m being charged with illegally being in the establishment past the curfew decided by the city of Cedar Rapids. I wasn’t drinking, nor had I planned on it. And yet, I was in trouble for being there.

The next time I’m in trouble with law enforcement, fingers crossed I’m tripping on acid, driving a car I stole, on my way to pick up some heroin from my local dealer with the crack I laced my joint with sitting in the glovebox.

Moving on to less stupidly illegal things in life, let’s go back to my favourite topic at the moment: Mia. I honestly can’t figure out what the fuck is going on. Zane and I weren’t the only ones at the aforementioned improv show; Mia was there. She and her friend Matthew sat next to me and Zane, and I’m so hopeless that I was well aware of the fact that she was less than a foot from me for a solid hour and a half. That’s how awful I am, and yes I know. From literally anyone else, I would have interpreted her behaviour as flirting (frequent whispering in my ear, a LOT of casual touching, etc.) but with her, I’m just not sure. I’ve asked Colin (her best friend and my newest friend) what I’m supposed to think, and he told me to be patient. I’m a really patient person, hence the reason I want to be an elementary teacher, but I’m not good with complicated. I’m about as straightforward as it gets with literally everything. If you’ve got something in your teeth, I’ll tell you. If your new bangs look horrible, I’ll tell you. Honesty is the best policy, and I can be brutal about it. I never intend to be rude or mean, I’ve just never seen the point in being anything less than honest. It’s a waste of everyone’s time, and often hurts more people than it helps, so I don’t do it. I’ve applied that concept of brutal honesty to just about everything in my life, in that things don’t get complicated for me because I never make a mess of them in the first place. I’ve found that almost 100% of messy situations are a result of some kind of dishonesty, and I don’t fuck with that, so messy has never been an issue for me. However, because of this, I have no idea how to handle it; and Mia is a very messy situation. She’s got so much going on, I’m not certain even she knows what’s happening. I’m really interested in her, and I’d like to take her out on a second date, but she’s yet to give me a straight answer, and the whole thing is beginning to feel like a jacked game of Red Light Green Light, but it’s going to end like Red Rover because I’m about to get clotheslined. I’m giving it a bit, and then I’m going to ask her to be honest and tell me if she’s stringing me along or playing some kind of game, because I don’t know how much longer I can stand not knowing.

Steele