LJ Idol - Three Strikes Edition - Week 1 - Black Rainbow
Lunchtime is lonely by choice. Kas could probably find a colleague to eat with most days, but her work is a lot of talking to people, and talking them through very tangled problems. So it’s nice to escape to the solitude of her car with it’s heated seat and maybe some kind of healthy drive through window and some NPR or a podcast for a little bit each day. It’s especially nice on days like today when it seems like very little of the world makes sense.
The mountain of work that’s waiting for her when she finishes this lunch seems never-ending. Kas knows that even when it doesn’t feel like it, her work fits her into the world in a way that has meaning. It’s just that people are doing so very many things that don’t seem to make sense or that just seem to be hurting other people- hurting the world. There are days when Kas’s job feels more like a part of broken society than a part of society.
She takes a sip of her iced tea and enjoys the cold liquid in her mouth and the clean bite of the bitterness. She knows that she’s probably mostly just down because she has a lot on her plate- more to do this week than is realistic. And she is tired. It’s been more than three weeks since she tested positive for Covid, and since that terrible first week of headache and fever she’s been steadily mending. But she still isn’t quite back yet despite all the negative tests. It is taking forever for her sinuses to clear.
She pulls into a city park near her work and finds a parking spot in the dirt and winter leaves under the trees. It’s just cold enough that she doesn’t want to open the windows all the way, but she cracks them and hears birds and barking dogs and kids running across the boardwalk that crosses the pond. She feels like she should recognize the voice on the radio- a movie director who has completed a film about an evil grifter, a man who joins an old fashioned carnival and learns the art of the con.
The director- ah! It is Guillermo del Toro- is making the movie seem palatable even though it is dark stuff- not Kas’s cup of tea. He’s talking about a theme of the fortune telling carnies selling false dreams through trickery, how they learn to sell what he calls the dark rainbow by making the right kinds of promises that appeal to everyone. Kas is convinced that Guillermo del Toro is a genius, even though she hasn’t seen that many of his films. He always seems to find a way to make a story about something that’s off-putting into something intriguing.
***
Saturday! Kas made it to the weekend. True, she still has more to do- dishes, laundry, workouts, dog walks, cleaning- than the weekend could possibly contain. But it feels good to have choices about when to do what. It feels good to get up early and sneak out alone.
What even is the dream she’s chasing, now, Kas wonders, in this moment of relative morning calm, ensconced at the bar at the breakfast joint just outside her neighborhood. Definitely having a minute to sit and let someone else cook for her is part of it. But not all of it. She’s also looking forward to making something good for her family tonight.
The wait staff here and even the line cooks that she can see all have their own distinct fashions. Pretty tats and facial jewelry and makeup expertly applied. There’s one waitress whose red lipstick is a beautiful bright orange-red, perfect for her skin tone. Kas tried to explain to her daughters how lipstick is one of those things where you have to pick the right shade for you, and so picking a color for their whole dance troupe to match costumes was always going to be difficult. But Kas doesn’t wear lipstick enough to even know what color families work best for her. When she sees herself reflected wearing lipstick her eye is always caught and jarred. Whose great big highlighted lips are those, anyway?
So Kas almost never wears lipstick. And though it’s true that she prefers a natural looking lip, it’s also because she just never really learned the habit of lipstick, or any makeup for that matter. She dabbled a little, sure. When she was younger, she loved to cosplay at science fiction conventions and she started to try to learn makeup for that. She did a character once that wore lipstick with a bright purple-pink hue. She would never have guessed that the purple would look nice on her, but it had.
Her daughters were mortified when she told them about the conversation she had with another mom from their dance troupe regarding makeup. This year the team was all supposed to buy liquid eyeliner, which Kas thought was needlessly difficult to apply. “I’ll buy whatever they tell us to buy,” she’d said, “But nobody at my house knows how to apply that. I don’t even think that liquid eyeliner is s skill that humans need to cultivate. I mean, we could be using those brain cells for something else.”
She hadn’t meant anything against people who chose to use liquid eyeliner. It just seemed like a needlessly difficult choice. She figured that you’ve got to pick your battles in this life. But not everyone chose the same battles.
Kas’s waitress came by with a full glass of tea for her and Kas smiled. Her waitress was one of the few who didn’t seem to be wearing makeup, but her eyebrow piercing and nose stud and outfit all still looked just right. There were a multitude of ways to look put together.
***
Monday morning and it is cold, wet, and grey, but Kas is feeling put together again. It’s funny how some weeks Monday morning turns into a good place to start after a weekend of introspection. Maybe things will soon seem out of control again and maybe they won’t, but there’s a nice rhythm in the start of a normal work week.
-------------------------------
tonithegreat is hoping for some normal workweek rhythm herself. Hopefully this little vignette vibes with your rhythm this week. This was a tough prompt from my perspective!
The mountain of work that’s waiting for her when she finishes this lunch seems never-ending. Kas knows that even when it doesn’t feel like it, her work fits her into the world in a way that has meaning. It’s just that people are doing so very many things that don’t seem to make sense or that just seem to be hurting other people- hurting the world. There are days when Kas’s job feels more like a part of broken society than a part of society.
She takes a sip of her iced tea and enjoys the cold liquid in her mouth and the clean bite of the bitterness. She knows that she’s probably mostly just down because she has a lot on her plate- more to do this week than is realistic. And she is tired. It’s been more than three weeks since she tested positive for Covid, and since that terrible first week of headache and fever she’s been steadily mending. But she still isn’t quite back yet despite all the negative tests. It is taking forever for her sinuses to clear.
She pulls into a city park near her work and finds a parking spot in the dirt and winter leaves under the trees. It’s just cold enough that she doesn’t want to open the windows all the way, but she cracks them and hears birds and barking dogs and kids running across the boardwalk that crosses the pond. She feels like she should recognize the voice on the radio- a movie director who has completed a film about an evil grifter, a man who joins an old fashioned carnival and learns the art of the con.
The director- ah! It is Guillermo del Toro- is making the movie seem palatable even though it is dark stuff- not Kas’s cup of tea. He’s talking about a theme of the fortune telling carnies selling false dreams through trickery, how they learn to sell what he calls the dark rainbow by making the right kinds of promises that appeal to everyone. Kas is convinced that Guillermo del Toro is a genius, even though she hasn’t seen that many of his films. He always seems to find a way to make a story about something that’s off-putting into something intriguing.
***
Saturday! Kas made it to the weekend. True, she still has more to do- dishes, laundry, workouts, dog walks, cleaning- than the weekend could possibly contain. But it feels good to have choices about when to do what. It feels good to get up early and sneak out alone.
What even is the dream she’s chasing, now, Kas wonders, in this moment of relative morning calm, ensconced at the bar at the breakfast joint just outside her neighborhood. Definitely having a minute to sit and let someone else cook for her is part of it. But not all of it. She’s also looking forward to making something good for her family tonight.
The wait staff here and even the line cooks that she can see all have their own distinct fashions. Pretty tats and facial jewelry and makeup expertly applied. There’s one waitress whose red lipstick is a beautiful bright orange-red, perfect for her skin tone. Kas tried to explain to her daughters how lipstick is one of those things where you have to pick the right shade for you, and so picking a color for their whole dance troupe to match costumes was always going to be difficult. But Kas doesn’t wear lipstick enough to even know what color families work best for her. When she sees herself reflected wearing lipstick her eye is always caught and jarred. Whose great big highlighted lips are those, anyway?
So Kas almost never wears lipstick. And though it’s true that she prefers a natural looking lip, it’s also because she just never really learned the habit of lipstick, or any makeup for that matter. She dabbled a little, sure. When she was younger, she loved to cosplay at science fiction conventions and she started to try to learn makeup for that. She did a character once that wore lipstick with a bright purple-pink hue. She would never have guessed that the purple would look nice on her, but it had.
Her daughters were mortified when she told them about the conversation she had with another mom from their dance troupe regarding makeup. This year the team was all supposed to buy liquid eyeliner, which Kas thought was needlessly difficult to apply. “I’ll buy whatever they tell us to buy,” she’d said, “But nobody at my house knows how to apply that. I don’t even think that liquid eyeliner is s skill that humans need to cultivate. I mean, we could be using those brain cells for something else.”
She hadn’t meant anything against people who chose to use liquid eyeliner. It just seemed like a needlessly difficult choice. She figured that you’ve got to pick your battles in this life. But not everyone chose the same battles.
Kas’s waitress came by with a full glass of tea for her and Kas smiled. Her waitress was one of the few who didn’t seem to be wearing makeup, but her eyebrow piercing and nose stud and outfit all still looked just right. There were a multitude of ways to look put together.
***
Monday morning and it is cold, wet, and grey, but Kas is feeling put together again. It’s funny how some weeks Monday morning turns into a good place to start after a weekend of introspection. Maybe things will soon seem out of control again and maybe they won’t, but there’s a nice rhythm in the start of a normal work week.
-------------------------------
tonithegreat is hoping for some normal workweek rhythm herself. Hopefully this little vignette vibes with your rhythm this week. This was a tough prompt from my perspective!