better (worse?)than palm readings
I saw my future yesterday. terribly lit and struggling to be heard over the din of non-descript music playing over what, in years passed, might have been a jukebox. I am thirty and "having a beer" with some coworkers at happy hour in my local bar. I can't drink too much because I need to drive home. We all talk about work because we don't really have anything else to say. When we try to branch out conversation it all leads back to how we're single and don't want to be/LOVE TO BE (spoken in capslock because its more believable that way)/married but call it "hitched" and talk about our beloved as "the old ball 'n' chain."
the thirty-somethings in suburbia lead a bleak existance. They look at me funny when I order a bright orange drink with some fancy rhyming name written on the chalk board at the end of the bar. The drink is sweet and cold and tastes like mango, and i take out the dead fruit-fly with my finger and wipe it on my skirt. No one (except the bartender) notices that I haven't a clue how to leave a tip in a bar. I sway nervously on my work-heals. I try to make conversation, but everyone sounds like the kids I ignored in highschool: a little self important, a little self-pittying and not terribly interesting. Only this time I desparately want to be their friend. In a few weeks, andrew and my parents will be the only ones left on this island who knows me out of my suit and heals. this is what passes as a social life.
Lisa thinks I need a friend and maybe I do. She's been going out of her way to add her flavour of spice into what she thinks is my all-work-and-no-play life. She can't picture me in patchwork skirts or slamming poetry or kissing my drag-clad friends. She thinks i'm someone she would have ignored in high school: nose buried in a text book, substituting derivitives where others had dates. She told me i was "serious." But I was never that thing either, nor do I ever want to be her.
I do need to make freinds though, and I'm not sure how or where. Suburbia is a bleak and lonely place. I get giddy when andrew and I trek the half hour ride to the little lesbian-owned richly-muraled sandwich shop and I take 15 minutes to order something crunchy and vegetarian just cause I can. And I sip hot chai and eat something that tastes like seseme seeds and lentils and feel far drunker than I felt at the bar the night before.
I know what I want from my future. I think about DC and the WITT girls and how quickly and richly those friendships formed. How differently we danced than the nervous sway of the 30-somethings to the rythem of their biological clocks. Maybe I need to dedicate every shred of my existance to makeing sure that I remember where I belong.
In the meantime though, any tips for maintiantnance of sanity would be muchly appreciated.
the thirty-somethings in suburbia lead a bleak existance. They look at me funny when I order a bright orange drink with some fancy rhyming name written on the chalk board at the end of the bar. The drink is sweet and cold and tastes like mango, and i take out the dead fruit-fly with my finger and wipe it on my skirt. No one (except the bartender) notices that I haven't a clue how to leave a tip in a bar. I sway nervously on my work-heals. I try to make conversation, but everyone sounds like the kids I ignored in highschool: a little self important, a little self-pittying and not terribly interesting. Only this time I desparately want to be their friend. In a few weeks, andrew and my parents will be the only ones left on this island who knows me out of my suit and heals. this is what passes as a social life.
Lisa thinks I need a friend and maybe I do. She's been going out of her way to add her flavour of spice into what she thinks is my all-work-and-no-play life. She can't picture me in patchwork skirts or slamming poetry or kissing my drag-clad friends. She thinks i'm someone she would have ignored in high school: nose buried in a text book, substituting derivitives where others had dates. She told me i was "serious." But I was never that thing either, nor do I ever want to be her.
I do need to make freinds though, and I'm not sure how or where. Suburbia is a bleak and lonely place. I get giddy when andrew and I trek the half hour ride to the little lesbian-owned richly-muraled sandwich shop and I take 15 minutes to order something crunchy and vegetarian just cause I can. And I sip hot chai and eat something that tastes like seseme seeds and lentils and feel far drunker than I felt at the bar the night before.
I know what I want from my future. I think about DC and the WITT girls and how quickly and richly those friendships formed. How differently we danced than the nervous sway of the 30-somethings to the rythem of their biological clocks. Maybe I need to dedicate every shred of my existance to makeing sure that I remember where I belong.
In the meantime though, any tips for maintiantnance of sanity would be muchly appreciated.