A week ago I went to talk to my school counselor. Getting help, any kind of help, is something I’d been considering for years. Often I would fantasize about confiding in a woman sitting next to me on the high-speed train to Madrid, the gentleman in the supermarket check-out line, a little-known writer of Sunday [...]
The cat Xylem is older than you, that’s for sure. But then again, the cat Xylem is unsure what words like “older” or “younger” even mean. He does not see them as independent terms, corresponding to items of human concern, but rather as amalgams of the alphabet, floating beyond his comprehension. He does understand the [...]
A strange thing has been happening with my lips lately. They are swollen and split, segmented into thin cellular clumps like slices of bruised apples. I am dedicating myself, still, to my miserable novel, as well as other elements of quotidian life. Not everything I have been doing has been going beautifully. But when I [...]
Em: Where are we meeting exactly? Boy: Town hall square. Em: But where in the square? North? South? East? West? Boy: In front of the door. Em: What door? Boy: Below the balcony. Em: What balcony? Boy: Town hall’s! Em: I thought we were meeting at the square. Now we’re meeting at town hall? [no [...]
Because it makes very little sense for me to take part in it, for my daily English hour I am sent instead to the Computer Science lab. ”Lab” is perhaps a little too indulgent of a name. I’d consider it more appropriate to term it “attic”, even though, strictly speaking, it’s not really one. It’s on [...]
On Wednesday of last week the entire tenth grade was bused to the career fair. Wait, I think I should capitalize that, and perhaps add some inflection: CAREEEEER fair. WHAT YOU’RE GOING TO DO WITH YOUR LIIIIIFE fair. For two hours, I entertained myself by collecting and color-coordinating pamphlets, filling in applications for a varied [...]
You know that triangle puzzle you learned in grade school one Monday when the teacher forwent the lesson plan for something a little more “out of the box”? Or maybe when your uncle Wallace drew it for you on the back of a shopping list, getting the proportions a little wrong, rounding the corners a [...]
I’m re-reading what I’ve been writing and, to be honest, it’s pretty baffling. EMMA IT HAS NEVER BEEN MORE OBVIOUS TO THE INTERNET THAT YOU ARE MENSTRUATING. I find it difficult to compromise the different concepts of the human being evolution has deemed we become and the human being the modern world insists we are. [...]
There’s nothing wrong. I am girl fighting over bathroom jurisdiction, clothes still a little soggy from the clothesline, running in time with traffic lights and yes, I do catch that school bus Monday through Friday, you thought I wouldn’t, didn’t you? It’s nothing glamorous. Elbow on desk, cheek in hand, books splayed and sweater discarded [...]
Why I feel old: the songs I used to listen to are on the Oldie’s station, the Pluto I knew erased from science books, the television shows I’d tape on the VCR discontinued, the slang I so liberally tossed around replaced by Internet memes, the actors I mimicked in rehab. I talk about Reagan’s funeral [...]