(no subject)
Because I have A) a family legacy of minor Bollywood fame, B) Airbears, and C) approximately twelve thousand lectures on point versus mobile sources of pollution under my belt already:
The girl sitting next to me in the Wheeler computing center today had posted a personal ad on craiglist. She’d been exchanging e-mails with some guy who had finally written an eloquent and compelling ultimatum. “I’m chicken,” she’d said in a previous note, “You don’t even know my real name. What if we’re out somewhere and one of my friends sees us and hears you calling me ‘Bella’?” He wasn’t having any of it, though, because it’d be broad daylight, in a café somewhere, and he wouldn’t pressure her into anything-but if, as he imagined she would, “Bella” wanted to “fuck his brains out” on first sight, he wouldn’t object. And if after this inherently safe café rendez-vous she wasn’t convinced “she was the luckiest girl in the world” to have met him, he’d leave her alone-and a grave mistake, that would be, given his position as a “high profile figure in the financial investment industry”.
This girl was blonde and fine-boned and pretty and her face was closed and would look natural, typically, behind books about art history. It was inexplicable. She wasn’t wearing a scarf but I superimposed one on her anyway, and it was red and ineffective. This girl was like that, and as she stared beyond the glass of her monitor, clenching and unclenching predictably delicate fists, she deftly destroyed my early ambitions of a New Year’s resolution to stop fucking reading over other people’s shoulders and blaming the act, which by any reasonable analysis is inexcusable and juvenile, on the most hyperbolic gems of cover letters and high school “personal reflections” gone by like a “journalistic ethos” or “insatiable curiosity for the human experience”. I think in the real world we call this being a nosy bitch.
Through the window I could hear whistles and drums and chanting-“Save the Oaks!”
Later, I bought a gyro at the Mediterranean place at Asian Ghetto. I have a bizarre affection for it-possibly because it’s not Asian and my culinary racism is out of control, or possibly because its walls are blank and cashiers earnest as fuck-so I was pleased to see it crowded. They gave me a lollypop announcing “It’s a BOY”. The BOY’s photo was taped to the counter-“PROUD PARENTS, OCTOBER 26.” I was giddy for them. And people appeared exactly where I imagined they would appear, and when the “Four Spiritual Laws” booklet likewise materialized under my nose as I sat eating on a bench, the offering hands belonged to precisely the doe-eyed, angelic little Koreans my head generated even before I tore myself from the look of the grass in the wind in the sun.
She read the booklet to me word for word as if she feared I was actually as well as spiritually illiterate, but in a bizarrely Christian way I felt nothing but empty compassion for the act. The diagrams of the yawning gap between my sinful existence and God’s radiant love were hilarious, but as I smiled my honest “no” and “never” and “not particularly” I still wanted to buy them flowers, and I tried for some reason to mitigate my obligatory declarations of atheism with compliments on the Bible’s use of language, as if the most powerful and oppressive book in history needed my admiration of its way with words to bump its Amazon ranking.
So anyway: Every hour, a series of small and beautiful clichés.
The girl sitting next to me in the Wheeler computing center today had posted a personal ad on craiglist. She’d been exchanging e-mails with some guy who had finally written an eloquent and compelling ultimatum. “I’m chicken,” she’d said in a previous note, “You don’t even know my real name. What if we’re out somewhere and one of my friends sees us and hears you calling me ‘Bella’?” He wasn’t having any of it, though, because it’d be broad daylight, in a café somewhere, and he wouldn’t pressure her into anything-but if, as he imagined she would, “Bella” wanted to “fuck his brains out” on first sight, he wouldn’t object. And if after this inherently safe café rendez-vous she wasn’t convinced “she was the luckiest girl in the world” to have met him, he’d leave her alone-and a grave mistake, that would be, given his position as a “high profile figure in the financial investment industry”.
This girl was blonde and fine-boned and pretty and her face was closed and would look natural, typically, behind books about art history. It was inexplicable. She wasn’t wearing a scarf but I superimposed one on her anyway, and it was red and ineffective. This girl was like that, and as she stared beyond the glass of her monitor, clenching and unclenching predictably delicate fists, she deftly destroyed my early ambitions of a New Year’s resolution to stop fucking reading over other people’s shoulders and blaming the act, which by any reasonable analysis is inexcusable and juvenile, on the most hyperbolic gems of cover letters and high school “personal reflections” gone by like a “journalistic ethos” or “insatiable curiosity for the human experience”. I think in the real world we call this being a nosy bitch.
Through the window I could hear whistles and drums and chanting-“Save the Oaks!”
Later, I bought a gyro at the Mediterranean place at Asian Ghetto. I have a bizarre affection for it-possibly because it’s not Asian and my culinary racism is out of control, or possibly because its walls are blank and cashiers earnest as fuck-so I was pleased to see it crowded. They gave me a lollypop announcing “It’s a BOY”. The BOY’s photo was taped to the counter-“PROUD PARENTS, OCTOBER 26.” I was giddy for them. And people appeared exactly where I imagined they would appear, and when the “Four Spiritual Laws” booklet likewise materialized under my nose as I sat eating on a bench, the offering hands belonged to precisely the doe-eyed, angelic little Koreans my head generated even before I tore myself from the look of the grass in the wind in the sun.
She read the booklet to me word for word as if she feared I was actually as well as spiritually illiterate, but in a bizarrely Christian way I felt nothing but empty compassion for the act. The diagrams of the yawning gap between my sinful existence and God’s radiant love were hilarious, but as I smiled my honest “no” and “never” and “not particularly” I still wanted to buy them flowers, and I tried for some reason to mitigate my obligatory declarations of atheism with compliments on the Bible’s use of language, as if the most powerful and oppressive book in history needed my admiration of its way with words to bump its Amazon ranking.
So anyway: Every hour, a series of small and beautiful clichés.