No matter what room i pick in our new apartment i have a slopey ceiling and a wall all in red brick and mortar. My mother and i were looking at houses the summer after my Junior year in highschool, and every house was a fight. I was insistent on staying within an easy commute of my highschool, and she was insistent on not buying some horrid house just so i could be close to my highschool. There was one last house we looked at before we finally looked at rentals, and it was in this odd mid-suburb that’s actually still a part of philadelphia. It was a compromise… wide flat streets with sidewalks tucked inbetween grass on either side, sagging porch roofs extending out from standalone single and double homes that looked grey and sad. I was bitter and disinterested, because it would be nearly impossible for me to get to school from there, but i remember walking up to the third floor and my mother saying it would be wholly mine and seeing how half the walls were brick and i had my own tiny bathroom and how the ceiling sloped at angles from the top of the roof down to the eaves and thinking … “but, i could live here. this could feel like a home.”
Today the realtor walked down the stairs to leave me be and i stood spinning on the top floor at 44th and Walnut streets thinking “i can live here. this can be home.”
memories
Today was a long day. Sandwiched inbetween our normal visit schedule to admissions and the summer orientation schedule, today was a Sneak Preview event for engineers and design arts students. It was also the hottest day so far this year. These two factors combined made every little bit of the day last longer than it was ever intended to, and produced one too many groucy parents for my taste. They complained about everything… tour wasn’t long enough, tour was too long, not enough water, too much water with other things excluded, not enough information about academics, not enough information about student life…. and these contrasting viewpoints were just from the handful of evaluations i snatched a glance at. I suppose the moral is that you can’t please all of the people all of the time, especially when the mercury gets past the 9-0 mark.
However, my day was even longer than all that would imply for a very special reason: i somehow elected myself to be our Dragon mascot. Now, this wasn’t just something i came up with willy-nilly… the perspective engineers were building catapults, and they wanted something for them to be able to aim their velcro-covered whiffle balls at. So, first my job was getting the suit and finding a volunteer, but it soon became finding a volunteer to replace me in the schedule of events so that i could wear the suite.
Have you ever been a mascot? The feet are giant-sized novelty-slippers that are too big to fit onto stairs. The body is saggy and feels a lot like being wrapped up in terrycloth only, when wrapped in terrycloth, how often do you have a tail that’s over a yard long? But, the most important consideration in how awkward a mascot suit is to maneuver in is the head. Since our mascot is a cartoony dragon, i get topeer out of the maw of the mighty beast… and the maw continues for nearly a foot beyond my eyes before it ends. My eyes and ears and spiny-things extend far enough above the top of my head that i cannot touch my hands together over top of it.
Add all of this together to get me, as the dragon, standing in the middle of the grand court of our Main Building schmoozing with our guests and then having them fire small projectiles at my head. In the process i got to pose with our elusive President Papadakis, pick my dragon-teeth with pieces of catapult Connex, and be pummeled again and again in the crotch by low flying whiffle balls. However, as much as i might complain, please note that 50% + 1 of our attendees dropped off applications, which is better than average for an event so early in the application process for rising Seniors. So, if you’ll excuse me, i’m off to take a well-deserved nap before beginning tonight’s recording. Afterall, i went to bed rather late last night…
I used to have psychic dreams pretty regularly, but eventually my ability to fly replaced the premonitions. They were small and unimportant visions anyway, and they always came to me in an obscure enough fashion that i was never really sure of what i knew until i saw it happening in real life. But, i can’t fly rather than walking to work, so ultimately knowing just what flying feels like is a curse more than a blessing.
And knowing that Jessica’s hair would be blue ahead of when she told me she thought non-platonic meant what platonic means was actually rather amusing, in a way that distracted me from the biting pain of another romantic blunder.
Almost-kisses are some of the worst things in the world, but generally not a terrible idea in retrospect. Bodies twisted with hands braced against each other and noses touching in their own tiny eskimo kiss so that you can feel the breath pass from her mouth to yours and then you feel that cellular-level inertia telling you that this is supposed to be a kiss but your brain maintains control of your locomotion and a minute later you are just talking again.
I don’t know how much i like my brain. For every almost-kiss i’ve participated in there’s been some pretty shitty consequences to be had in exchange for a kiss, but sometimes it might be worth consequences. However, sometimes almost is enough. And sometimes i might just be an idiot. But, at least i’m an idiot with a brain.
(i’ll spell check it tomorrow, i promise. for now just wince along and enjoy the only mistakes i made were proper nouns, so spell check was usless. feel free to keep wincing)
where to begin, where to begin
i think, perhaps, my mother could be turning into some sort of closeted pill popping addict. Nothing serious though… nothing a psychiatrist would provide (aside #4: could, should, whichever…). She’s down the shore right now, and i’m feeding our cat. Except for, “down the shore” definitely means something like “meeting my dealer to score some really good shit.”
Good shit being strong antibiotics, and maybe some cough syrup laced with codeine.
However, “feeding the cat” definitely only means feeding the cat.
Our household has always been known to hoard prescription medication, and my mother getting a nursing degree only made things worse. What can i say, we enjoy being well prepared. However, when i just hit the medicine cabinet for some Benadryl because i can’t even see straight enough to work the teevee remote (aside #6: yet, i can still type) i found myself wading in the midst of what has to be fifty bottles of medication. Fifty! Tiny blue pills, shiny green pills, pills that rat-a-tat-tat in their brown glass bottles, purple pills that look for the life of me a lot like Starburst. And that isn’t even counting herbal supplements. The entire counter below the cabinet is all charcoal and cell salts and et cetera.
(Aside #1: i forgot my bestest truth on my list of truths and lies. when i was five i overdosed on cell salts because i thought they tasted like vanilla. i was at my dad’s place which in my memory seems as though it was desperately hanging onto the seventies, and i opened the lid because nothing was childproofed back then and they all just slid out onto the glass table in an avalanche of melt-in-your-mouth goodness and i wondered how many i could fit under my tongue all at once.)
I haven’t fed the cat yet. Any minute now.
We really do live in a culture of the quick fix subscription to things: medication, magazines, cable teevee. I’m currently reading Survivor by Chuck Pal-something-Fight-Club-niuk, and it seems to be all about putting patches on things that aren’t really fixable. So far. Chuck loves to write about criminally fucked up men and the strange alluring women who motivate their plots – and he definitely could do worse. (Aside #2: Where is my strange & alluring plot motivator? All of his seem like they’re written for Helena Bonham Carter, or a very strung-out Angelina Jolie after all this Tomb Raider hype blows over. But, what am i saying, i had my plot motivator and this is my novel. Silly boy.). Survivor doesn’t beat my last solid read-through Plan B, but it has Club beat hands down. The guy is gunning to be the next Vonnegut, and how many other authors do you read that sit in puddles of their own blood and urine for fun and leisure?
Yeah, certainly not this one. Or, at least, i tend not to immortalize my tales of blood and urine by posting them to the internet. My face feels like it’s melting but that’s just my allergies, but this is so incredibly bad that i can’t even seem to focus on anything for very long and i really need that benadryl and at least my mom could hoard something fun like opium or something, but no, it’s all bladder supplements and pain relievers. Damn you, St. John’s Wort… damn you to hell.
(Aside #3: This whole aside thing is rather clumsy, but all my html purist friends complain if i make a link with a title-tag that shows my aside but then the link leads nowhere. I might have to start using the infamous footnote, because my parenthetical comments are really turning into blogs of their own. but, i digress for now…)
This house is a funny empty thing. Me and the cat, and he doesn’t seem to like me so much right now despite me being the keeper of the can opener. We have mirrors on either side of my living room and i often just have the urge to stand in the middle of the two totally naked just to see my infinite naked images stretching into eternity as the mirrors echo and echo themselves. This again goes back to the fact that i love to exhibit, but i also love to perfect, so in the end i’ll wind up just like radiohead, crafting until the product becomes obscured. Perfectionist exhibitionists all turn out narcissists ’cause they have to listen to themselves so much to get it right.
So, anyhow, the point is that i could never do an all-nude review, but i definitely should have a webcam. But, in the absence of that, i could honestly just pound my fist into the wall until it shattered (aside #5: my fist, that is) into a thousand shards and no one would ever hear or know or anything. I started to do it because it seemed like a way to pass the time, but after a while my hand started to vaguely ache and the wall seemed somewhat unfazed and the whole ordeal reminded me of when Selina would do the same thing so i stopped and want back to staring into our unassuming little medicine cabinet.
This is so different from my apartment, where all sorts of little noises creep in from room to room and from floor to ceiling. My apartment bleeds living human noises from corner to floorboard. Here i don’t have any noise with me. It’s just these clackity keys clacking away, and the cat shuffling up and down the stairs trying not to let me notice him, and silence upon silence upon silence. Where to begin?