Archives for March, 2006

We were discussing things of paramount importance, like which came first, the sleeveless dress or the hairless armpit, when I took a detour and noted There are people who, when alone, look lonely and did not look to the far right corner of the room, where he sat, alone and lonely with his laptop, wanting not to be seen alone and also to be seen by someone who would make him not alone, looking up hungrily with every passing person and laugh. And there are people who, when alone, do not look lonely.
I want to be one of those people who when alone do not look lonely.

You’re on crack, replied my friend.

The first years begin to look less like first years and more like upper years. It’s in the way they hold themselves and the way they look back at us and the way their eyes pass carelessly now over campus architecture. The way they get on the bus.
And the final years wander the university streets dressed in suits and starchy shirts and well pressed pants, their carefully coiffed hair fluttering carefully in the careless breeze, looking like misplaced executives. Continue reading this entry »

Culture Shock, the last publication of the year to publish any of my work, came out yesterday. I picked up a copy today and really, I’ve never been so aware of how very second rate my writing is. (First I shut my eyes and my heart to The Typo: my name, note all ye sundry, is spelled with an H. It splits my name into two exact halves and I’d appreciate it if people would not forget that.) The clichés. The sentimentalism. The kung fu kick in the chest subtleties.

And I, who love nuances, hear only fingernails on chalkboards when it comes to my published work. I should have waited a while, let those pieces stew and then I could have gone back and maybe seeped in them in retrospection and given them something more than good intentions.

Instead.

I am not embarrassed, as I often am with my heavily transgressed editorials, just faintly repulsed. Which is nice, you know, for change. I don’t blush when I’m repulsed.

Yesterday, as the bus pulled into campus for the beginning of my day, I noticed how much of a difference one Caterpillar construction truck can make to the overall impression of campus. It politely headed the line of vehicles at the stoplight, quiet and unassuming, and yet by the very virtue of its simply being, campus immediately seemed that much busier. You immediately anticipated upturned piles of moist soil, crowds of neon orange vests, the smell of thick black ooze, and general hubbub. And there you are, sitting in a quiet bus with silent sunlight streaming through the clean windows, so it’s not as though you know that outside the world is being turned upside down.
Except for the truck, of course. Continue reading this entry »

It’s one of those things I do reflexively, like renewing my library books online. I turn on the computer, connect to the computer, click through a free-charity website, and check my stats. It’s not that I’m expecting much; it’s just a habit.

The thing about StatCounter is it generates graphs that scale to your numbers. So today, I had to blink when I saw a peak on the far left of the graph that had the rest of the graph hugging the x-axis. Continue reading this entry »

I found myself shaking in my Contemporary Literature class yesterday, when we were “discussing” Alice Walker’s The Color Purple.
And I put the word discussing in quotation marks, because it really wasn’t a discussion. It was really just a bunch of people talking without thinking, dissecting without knowing, and reaffirming instead of challenging. Continue reading this entry »

When it came time to grieve and declaim against my trials, I did what they said and looked for ***.

I stomped through the beginning of sentences and over proper nouns, extracting those capital letters as they towered over the others for my examination.
But there was nothing. No God was to be found in these looming behemoths, stern and forbidding, demanding respect, but skinny-legged and hollow. Continue reading this entry »