Imagine someone who uses a public space as a private space. This person is not crazy but has a reasonable excuse for behaving this way.
Today I'm working with an exercise from The 3 A.M. Epiphany by Brian Kitely. One suggestion is to do several exercises over the span of ten days or so and try to make them individual, but able to be laced together at the end. I'm going to give it a shot. This one had a suggested word count (400) but it wasn't working, so there you go.
------------
The email went out a few days before it was supposed to happen: a change of plans. I need to reschedule. I'm including a link to the map. Be there Saturday at 3. All replies to the email were ignored.
When Saturday arrived, Tom's friends showed up at the appointed location with all the necessary supplies: Raz, his hair in rainbow dreadlocks, and Fae, dressed like Lady Gaga, came together and Laney, who looked plain but had more piercings than the rest of them combined, a few minutes later. They exchanged curious glances with one another but shrugged it off and started distributing the drinks and snacks they'd smuggled in.
Tom was the last to arrive and even plainer than Laney, hair buzzed short and boring brown thanks to his old day job, wearing a simple hoodie and jeans. In this group of misfits, Tom was the one who didn't look like he belonged. Laney handed him a cup, which he took with a sheepish grin as he unloaded his backpack.
"So, Tom..." She bit her lip, glancing at the groups of other twenty-somethings in the room, pairs or trios, pointing at this bookshelf and that lamp, comparing prices.
He swallowed a mouthful of cookie. "Yeah?"
Raz interrupted, saying what was on all their minds. "Why are we at Ikea?" Tom had always hosted before now.
It was a Saturday afternoon and the crowds were milling around them, trying to ignore the fact that they had just busted out a Scrabble board, drinks and snacks, and were awkwardly making themselves in one of the living rooms on the third floor.
"I just wanted to try something different. Why not?"
This time it was Fae's turn. "Because that mom just looked at me like I might eat her kid and now everyone's avoiding this corner of the room? What gives?"
"Forget about it." He passed around the bag of tiles and unfolded the board. "Let's play."
----
Tom won. He always won Scrabble but no one complained because he really wasn't good at much of anything else they played. Fae and Raz were laughing and high-fiving him as they packed up, making plans to head downstairs to grab a plate of meatballs before going home. Laney lingered, though, rounding up the last of the plasticware even as Tom fitted the little wooden racks into the game box and closed it.
"So why -really-, Tom? I'm surprised no one threw us out." In fact, they hadn't seen a single employee in the entire hour or so that it took to get through all the tiles. Saturdays were always busy though, so it was possible they had just gone unnoticed. "Is everything okay?" She chucked the cups into a garbage can as they headed past the food court and through the front doors.
"Everything's fine, really. Let me walk you to your car." He started to lead off in the direction of her ride; an unmistakably ancient purple Jeep of some lineage, but she interrupted, grabbing his arm as she stood still.
"Tom..." The vehicle she pointed at was a clunker, by all accounts, with band stickers and slogans stuck all over the back end, but unmistakable as it had always looked like that for as long as she had known him. But now every inch of space was crammed full with boxes, clothes, CDs...she thought she even saw the end of a raggedy mop pressed against the passenger window.
"Forget it, Laney." He shrugged her off and fumbled for his keys.
"What happened?" Her voice rose an octave.
"I'm leaving, Lane. I got fired two months ago. Sold what I could and the rest of it is what you see. I've got a lead on a job in Santa Fe." He was at the driver's side door now, unlocking it.
"Why didn't you say something? You could have stayed with one of us, or let us help you look..."
"There's nothing here. I tried. Nothing." He waved a hand at the oppressive grey sky. "I was going to email you when I got there." He nudged her aside, opened the door and climbed in. "Look. I'm sorry. But I'm sick of here."
"But you can't--!"
"No buts, Lane. I'm gone." She grabbed for the door as he closed it, but missed, and she heard the distinct 'thunk' of the lock as he started up the car. "I'll write!"
She backed away from the car, but not before aiming a kick at his bumper as he backed out of the spot. "Asshole!"
She had a sinking feeling that it was the last time they'd ever speak. She was right.
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
Prompt #1: Describe a typical day during your Jr. High years.
My morning begins with the incessant beeping of my alarm clock. I'm a real grouch when a human being wakes me up, morning or not, and so Mom handed me an alarm clock after one too many sour mornings when I was six or seven or so. Now I usually catch the alarm in the first ten seconds or so. My alarm is set for 5:46. Mom's alarm is set for 4:23. I don't know why we can't set our clocks to go off at the normal even times that other people do. I know that my clock is set for the bare minimum of time it takes to hop out of bed and drag on some clothes, grab my lunch (which I won't eat) and my backpack (which smells like moldy sandwiches), and be ready to get in the car with Mom.
She drives me up the road not two minutes, to my grandparents' house. Eventually I will be allowed to stay home in the mornings, get my own breakfast, and walk to the bus stop myself, but not just yet. I'm younger than everyone else in my grade due to a mid-year birthday and the decision of my teachers to place me in third grade when we came back from winter break of what had started as my second-grade year. I missed the times tables, fractions, and cursive handwriting. I'm not sure this was the wisest move, as it took me a while to get caught up on that stuff, and even longer to get caught up in the finer points of acting the age of my peers. I probably won't really get there until college, if not later. But for now, I am concerned only with whatever sugary cereal my grandfather might have splurged on for me--in grade school it was almost always corn flakes or plain Cheerios, but now I'm getting Honeycomb and Waffle Crisp. I don't know what changed, but I don't complain.
Once it starts getting light, or in the winter, before the sun has even peeked out, I head to the bus stop, which is only a few steps down the hill. My grandmother sometimes watches me go, standing at the front door. I don't look forward to the bus, really. It is the last few minutes of sanctuary--at least in the mornings, when everyone else is still groggy and half-asleep--before what is to my eleven-year-old self, somewhat of a living hell.
Mornings aren't so bad, with language classes and science, but then there's gym and that involves hiding in the bathroom stalls to change. The locker room, which is the same one my mom used when she went to high school in the same building, is no preservation of modesty. Gym is embarrassing and I stick to my best friend who is similarly disinclined towards physical activity. After gym is band--my favorite--and I enjoy the acerbic wit of Mr. M, even if he is sexist, because I enjoy playing.
By the time fourth period rolls around, though, I have to pee. We are only allowed to leave class to pee once a week (we have to be signed out in our school-issued planners, and teachers check to see how often you go), so I usually have to hold it because it's almost impossible to get to your next class if you detour for the bathroom between classes. There are some teachers that will send you with a hall pass instead, and you impose on their generosity as much as possible without setting off the warning bells that will make them think you're smoking in there or something when really you just have a small bladder and had extra milk with breakfast this morning. If I can't get to the bathroom, odds are that I've either squirmed uncontrollably through an entire class until lunch, absorbing nearly nothing of the lesson because I'm focusing on my bladder's spasms, or I've wet myself to some degree. I am ashamed, of course, but at least my shirts are long and cover up my sins.
Lunch is normally outside with the few outcast friends I've managed to collect, and for some reason we do not eat lunch. Sometimes, in later days, I will discover that I can spend my lunchtime on the growing Internet! of 1996/7 and at least once get in trouble from the librarian for trying to print hundreds of pages of the libretto to one of my favorite musicals. She tracks me down later specifically to ask me what I was thinking. I don't know the answer to that question.
Instead of throwing whatever perishables I have packed for lunch each day, I let them collect in my backpack, which has the strangest odor to it after a few weeks of this. In my memory, this will be the smell of junior high, sour and rotting, and it fits my opinion of those two years in educational limbo between elementary and high school. It's like someone decided that kids our age were so obnoxious that they just separated us from the rest of the world until we got the worst of it out of our systems.
Afternoons were average, with at least one really interesting class for the "gifted" kids. Both years, last period was always the worst. Math with B. C., whose unrelenting torment about my furry legs in seventh grade eventually allowed me to persuade mom to let me start shaving. Eighth grade was choir. I loved singing (and was a proud alto) but not the girls I sat with, who never missed an occasion to mock me relentlessly for anything and everything, real or imagined. I felt fortunate to leave class a little early, one of two girls chosen to spend the last half hour of the day watching out the window in the principal's office with the Intercom microphone, calling buses as they arrived, dismissing the students who rode them. One of the reasons I was chosen, I think, was that aside from knowing I wouldn't abuse the PA, my bus was one of the last to leave. Eventually we would give the call that all students remaining were dismissed, and we would make our way outside to wait for our own transportation home.
I had a sort-of boyfriend, and he lived close enough to me that we rode the same bus home, and so I had some solace as we rumbled back to where we started every day, often heading back to my grandmothers' house until my mom came home from her job. I was allowed to walk as far as the top of the hill with him, but then I had to come back. If I behaved myself I could talk to him on the phone for a half hour, and a half hour only. We spent a lot of the time singing together because we were just weird like that.
Until dinner, I would hole up in my grandfather's bedroom, where there was a tiny color TV with a dial that ratcheted loudly as it went around. If I spun it too quickly my grandmother would yell. It only got about eight channels and I watched a lot of PBS. I might work on my homework while we waited for Mom, and when she came we would finally have dinner together, and then she and I would go home.
----
Okay, so not my favorite prompt, but it was what came up when I hit the button. Maybe tomorrow will be more interesting? I tried to remember my dreams when I woke up, but I could remember nothing beyond a guy whose eyes were sometimes red.
Current prompt from http://www.creativity-portal.com/prompts/imagination.prompt.html. Always taking suggestions for sites with short creative writing prompts!
She drives me up the road not two minutes, to my grandparents' house. Eventually I will be allowed to stay home in the mornings, get my own breakfast, and walk to the bus stop myself, but not just yet. I'm younger than everyone else in my grade due to a mid-year birthday and the decision of my teachers to place me in third grade when we came back from winter break of what had started as my second-grade year. I missed the times tables, fractions, and cursive handwriting. I'm not sure this was the wisest move, as it took me a while to get caught up on that stuff, and even longer to get caught up in the finer points of acting the age of my peers. I probably won't really get there until college, if not later. But for now, I am concerned only with whatever sugary cereal my grandfather might have splurged on for me--in grade school it was almost always corn flakes or plain Cheerios, but now I'm getting Honeycomb and Waffle Crisp. I don't know what changed, but I don't complain.
Once it starts getting light, or in the winter, before the sun has even peeked out, I head to the bus stop, which is only a few steps down the hill. My grandmother sometimes watches me go, standing at the front door. I don't look forward to the bus, really. It is the last few minutes of sanctuary--at least in the mornings, when everyone else is still groggy and half-asleep--before what is to my eleven-year-old self, somewhat of a living hell.
Mornings aren't so bad, with language classes and science, but then there's gym and that involves hiding in the bathroom stalls to change. The locker room, which is the same one my mom used when she went to high school in the same building, is no preservation of modesty. Gym is embarrassing and I stick to my best friend who is similarly disinclined towards physical activity. After gym is band--my favorite--and I enjoy the acerbic wit of Mr. M, even if he is sexist, because I enjoy playing.
By the time fourth period rolls around, though, I have to pee. We are only allowed to leave class to pee once a week (we have to be signed out in our school-issued planners, and teachers check to see how often you go), so I usually have to hold it because it's almost impossible to get to your next class if you detour for the bathroom between classes. There are some teachers that will send you with a hall pass instead, and you impose on their generosity as much as possible without setting off the warning bells that will make them think you're smoking in there or something when really you just have a small bladder and had extra milk with breakfast this morning. If I can't get to the bathroom, odds are that I've either squirmed uncontrollably through an entire class until lunch, absorbing nearly nothing of the lesson because I'm focusing on my bladder's spasms, or I've wet myself to some degree. I am ashamed, of course, but at least my shirts are long and cover up my sins.
Lunch is normally outside with the few outcast friends I've managed to collect, and for some reason we do not eat lunch. Sometimes, in later days, I will discover that I can spend my lunchtime on the growing Internet! of 1996/7 and at least once get in trouble from the librarian for trying to print hundreds of pages of the libretto to one of my favorite musicals. She tracks me down later specifically to ask me what I was thinking. I don't know the answer to that question.
Instead of throwing whatever perishables I have packed for lunch each day, I let them collect in my backpack, which has the strangest odor to it after a few weeks of this. In my memory, this will be the smell of junior high, sour and rotting, and it fits my opinion of those two years in educational limbo between elementary and high school. It's like someone decided that kids our age were so obnoxious that they just separated us from the rest of the world until we got the worst of it out of our systems.
Afternoons were average, with at least one really interesting class for the "gifted" kids. Both years, last period was always the worst. Math with B. C., whose unrelenting torment about my furry legs in seventh grade eventually allowed me to persuade mom to let me start shaving. Eighth grade was choir. I loved singing (and was a proud alto) but not the girls I sat with, who never missed an occasion to mock me relentlessly for anything and everything, real or imagined. I felt fortunate to leave class a little early, one of two girls chosen to spend the last half hour of the day watching out the window in the principal's office with the Intercom microphone, calling buses as they arrived, dismissing the students who rode them. One of the reasons I was chosen, I think, was that aside from knowing I wouldn't abuse the PA, my bus was one of the last to leave. Eventually we would give the call that all students remaining were dismissed, and we would make our way outside to wait for our own transportation home.
I had a sort-of boyfriend, and he lived close enough to me that we rode the same bus home, and so I had some solace as we rumbled back to where we started every day, often heading back to my grandmothers' house until my mom came home from her job. I was allowed to walk as far as the top of the hill with him, but then I had to come back. If I behaved myself I could talk to him on the phone for a half hour, and a half hour only. We spent a lot of the time singing together because we were just weird like that.
Until dinner, I would hole up in my grandfather's bedroom, where there was a tiny color TV with a dial that ratcheted loudly as it went around. If I spun it too quickly my grandmother would yell. It only got about eight channels and I watched a lot of PBS. I might work on my homework while we waited for Mom, and when she came we would finally have dinner together, and then she and I would go home.
----
Okay, so not my favorite prompt, but it was what came up when I hit the button. Maybe tomorrow will be more interesting? I tried to remember my dreams when I woke up, but I could remember nothing beyond a guy whose eyes were sometimes red.
Current prompt from http://www.creativity-portal.com/prompts/imagination.prompt.html. Always taking suggestions for sites with short creative writing prompts!
Reflection
So maybe it's the (crappy) weather, or maybe it's just my mood, but I've been reading through an old blog (2006-2007) tonight and it actually surprised me that my writing back then wasn't total garbage. That going back and looking at it, I'm kind of pleased with some of the things I said and the ideas I wrote about. I'm especially intrigued by the records I made of my dreams on a fairly regular basis. They were all quite interesting and lovely (even when they were horrific) and of course by now they are completely vanished from my memory.
I want to write again. As evidenced by this blog, I have a very difficult time doing so consistently. This is supported by the sporadic nature of other blogs and journals I've written, scattered about the internet in the past (oh my God has it been that long?) nine years or so. I started my first on LiveJournal in 2001, not long before I graduated high school. That journal was mostly abandoned by 2004 though I continued to make occasional posts (announcing the wedding and stuff like that) through 2007. From 2006 to 2007 I wrote on Vox, and then abandoned the whole blogging thing again until early 2008, when I started making posts here. And I've made all of...ten? posts in the past two years, so I can't say that I've spent a lot of time working on that "writing" thing lately. Reading, yes, as always, and I'll probably keep writing about reading because I feel like it gives me a direction when there's not always anything else to say.
Lent is upon us. I mentioned this to my husband upon seeing some very strange European Carnival pictures today and he mentioned that he felt like he should do something. I reminded him that it involved giving up something you liked, or a vice--not necessarily something bad for you, and now I'm thinking. I wonder if I can "give up" laziness and maybe kick this depression (hello SAD, nice to see you--again!)...writing isn't easy, and doing it every day is especially not easy. And laziness is certainly a bad habit that I could be rid of happily. The SAD is particularly on my mind right now--until I searched for "Lent" on Wikipedia just now, I swear to you that my Google search bar had "pictures of sunny days" in it because I was searching for any sliver of sunshine to brighten up my evening. There's no official diagnosis here or anything but the two feet of snow outside, constant snowy days, and half of February crossed off on the calendar all point that direction.
How long does it take to make a habit? Forty days sounds like a good start. And even if I think this is all crap now, well, firstly--there's pretty much no one reading it. Second, there's a decent chance that I might come back to it in a couple of years and think, hey, that's not so bad after all...
I want to write again. As evidenced by this blog, I have a very difficult time doing so consistently. This is supported by the sporadic nature of other blogs and journals I've written, scattered about the internet in the past (oh my God has it been that long?) nine years or so. I started my first on LiveJournal in 2001, not long before I graduated high school. That journal was mostly abandoned by 2004 though I continued to make occasional posts (announcing the wedding and stuff like that) through 2007. From 2006 to 2007 I wrote on Vox, and then abandoned the whole blogging thing again until early 2008, when I started making posts here. And I've made all of...ten? posts in the past two years, so I can't say that I've spent a lot of time working on that "writing" thing lately. Reading, yes, as always, and I'll probably keep writing about reading because I feel like it gives me a direction when there's not always anything else to say.
Lent is upon us. I mentioned this to my husband upon seeing some very strange European Carnival pictures today and he mentioned that he felt like he should do something. I reminded him that it involved giving up something you liked, or a vice--not necessarily something bad for you, and now I'm thinking. I wonder if I can "give up" laziness and maybe kick this depression (hello SAD, nice to see you--again!)...writing isn't easy, and doing it every day is especially not easy. And laziness is certainly a bad habit that I could be rid of happily. The SAD is particularly on my mind right now--until I searched for "Lent" on Wikipedia just now, I swear to you that my Google search bar had "pictures of sunny days" in it because I was searching for any sliver of sunshine to brighten up my evening. There's no official diagnosis here or anything but the two feet of snow outside, constant snowy days, and half of February crossed off on the calendar all point that direction.
How long does it take to make a habit? Forty days sounds like a good start. And even if I think this is all crap now, well, firstly--there's pretty much no one reading it. Second, there's a decent chance that I might come back to it in a couple of years and think, hey, that's not so bad after all...
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