How I keep myself from doing what I shouldn't be doing

More of a stolen form...


Afterliving



Facade



Late Night Poetry

I think this is my favorite conversation ever.

I have just run into a friend of mine who transferred schools for a semester:

Chris: Hey, how's it going!

Me: Oh good. How are you? I haven't seen you in forever! (I always say this to everyone, all the time.)

Chris: Good. I'm back.

Me: Yep.

Awkward silence...

Chris: I have a girlfriend now.

Me: Oh! Well, I have a boyfriend now.

Chris: Oh really, what's yours like?

Me: (shamelessly excited to one-up him in the romance department) You'll like this, he was my TA.

Chris: Oh yeah, well mine's a grad student... How old is yours?

Me: 25!

Chris: Mines 26.

Me: (This will get him, keep in mind mine is the younger one) Mine just got into a PHD program and is going to Iowa next year.

Chris: Mine was married when I met her!

(This is where I gasp and fall over in shock and defeat)

I'll spare you the three page versions

I think you should call me soon because I am tired
of pretending I know how
to occupy myself.

***

I've spent my weekend in the rain. The city is flooded and I think I got lost in the grey.

Saturday I spent my night in a downpour while a gay magician performed at his own 50th Birthday party. I watched through the windows and, when it was over, handed ice cream through the doorway while party-goers complained of their hands getting wet.

Sunday I had to be rescued from the company of strangers at my own neighborhood picnic and had a cheeseburger forced on me by a woman who thinks I'm pretty.

Today I cowered in a flooded pavilion with 200 Boy Scouts while a man in a camo pancho belted out three renditions of America the Beautiful for no apparent reason. I swear I had more muddy footprints on my pants than little boys present.

I think tomorrow I'll do a some laundry and neglect to charge my phone.

Art is precious

I am in my chair when the disability group comes into the gallery. My quiet sitting and looking at photographs from far distances and low angles is interrupted when six of them tromp through the glass door in a tidy line and immediately take off in separate directions.

Nightmare.

I hop up and follow a boy wearing a laminated nametag. STEVEN. He is twice my size and more excited than I have ever been about anything ever, let alone spending time in the gallery.

Steven has somehow managed to fit an entire plastic Slurpee cup into his front pocket and appears to be using it as a kind of makeshift wallet. Luckily, the kid only pays in change so no valuable bills catch in the wind as he insists on skip/gallop/electric sliding through the rooms. I herd him closer to his chaperone and we exchange pleading eyes. Mine win and she grabs a hold of his hand.

There is a girl with them. Fat and rectangular with Down Syndrome (or one of those other developmental diseases everyone calls Down Syndrome because it is a strikingly easy to remember name). Unlike the human piggybank, she walks with a measured precision. As if she were carrying a sleeping, fuzzy creature in her purse and the slightest jostling would disturb the all-too-cute slumber. She walks slowly and carefully up to one of Callahan’s photographs. The picture is of his wife and daughter, both naked, laying on the bed. Sunlight from an open shade leaves their skin and curves illuminated against a black background.


The girl stops in front of the picture and stares blankly for a moment. I watch her lean closer, as if for a better look, until her soft, ghostly pale face is pressed nearly to the glass. I can’t figure out what she could be searching for until I realize she isn’t looking at the image at all. She’s staring through the imperfect body in the photograph at her own reflection. I watch as she looks critical, brow furrowed, and reaches up to fix a single flyaway strand of hair. She then quickly turns and walks to the next room, holding her purse and moving with as much calculated dignity as the elegantly dressed women from the 1950s Chicago Street Shots directly ahead of her.