hatching from the seed of your thin mind

Things not to say when mysterious men from across the bar buy you and your friends jaegerbombs (ew.):

1. “Really? For us? Wow, that’s creepy.”

i seem to have swooned

all over again. This makes me dizzy with excitement and joy.

we were made in the dark

Let’s pretend that you are a beetle and you are hanging out around the President, an old apartment building in the Central West End of St. Louis, Missouri. You are doing your own thing and taking a stroll and hugging the pavement from time to time. Your life is just swell–the weather is a pleasant 82 degrees and the sun is shining and the landscaping surrounding you is particularly beautiful today.

You are perched on a rock, thinking about where in the world you’d like to crawl to next when you hear voices maybe 50 feet away–you’re really good at estimating the distance between you and nearby voices, by the by. So you look up and see two cute blondes and one girl with long dark hair who looks suspiciously gleeful for someone wearing a mostly black dress on a sunny day in St. Louis summer. Because you are an exceptionally observant beetle, you notice the girls are carrying shopping bags, lemonades and several magazines including The New Yorker, Good and Gourmet. You hear them making a plan to drink Prosecco on the Park Royal terrace. “I think there might be raspberries for it too!” one blonde girl says.

As the girls get closer to you, and you are thinking about what a lovely life it is at the Park Royal–one of the girls notices your existence. But girls never really liked you, did they? You never totally understood it–you’re an acceptable height and maybe kind of plain-looking, but not hideous, right? And you’re a nice beetle–at least you try to be, most of the time. The problem, my friend, is that you are, in fact, a beetle and not any other living thing in the world. Sorry, dude.

“OHMYGOD! That is SO GROSS! AHHHHH!!!!” Now you’re a little startled by these jumpy girls. They’re screaming really loudly. Especially the light-haired ones. They’ve stopped walking now and gotten really close to you; somehow the dark-haired girl has lagged behind. You’re speechless and motionless at the beauty of these darlings staring at you in disgust–you’ve never been so close to a girl before, actually. And in this momentary euphoria, the dark-haired girl–grinning a blinding smile–comes bounding in to catch up with the other girls.

“What’s going on here? Oh. That just won’t do,” she says lightly. The next thing you know, a Seychelle is growing larger and darker above you and suddenly you see the white light. It’s over. The sunny day, the pretty girls and this life.

The last thought you have before your fleeting time on earth is over is, “Well, at least I’m being killed by fabulous footwear. ” Because you are one classy beetle.

one way to restrain yourself from running into a bus

The cleft-palate babies. Their unpleasant faces are everywhere and the reaction they evoke in me is not a product of sympathy, guilt or hope–it’s a product of sheer annoyance. It makes me want to jack people in the face with a bag of nickels, to be frank.

give me a coral sometime

There exist a few things which continually occur in my life that cannot cease to make me laugh. Here they are:

1. Trying to think of what hilarious things Stacy and Clinton would say to the tragic-yet-hopeful twentysomething girl in the next lab over.  She puts together outfits that she really must actively try to make as illogical as they continuously are. Full length dresses under past-the-wasit sweaters and long, stringy gold jewlery with–are you ready?–clogs. Also, she just asked the new Korean dude if he likes Jameson on ice too. She’s from outside Peoria, IL.
2. The semi-homeless man who pretends to do the Post-Dispatch crossword puzzle outside the Einsten Bros Bagels on Laclede and Euclid every morning. He’s really leering at the young and handsome medical community passing him by. Sometimes, if I’m lucky, he’ll chuckle immediately following his creepy leer. It’s awesome.
3. Listening to the aforementioned girl from Peoria attempt to communicate with the Chinese people (there must be at least 4) and Korean man. She laughs awkwardly to herself when they stare at her blankly.
4. The homeless men who talk to me on my journey to and from Wash U. They seem to be the only men in this miserable town who are interested in me. AND they are hilarious to boot! Today one promised to make me a happy woman. He also reminded me that money doesn’t buy happiness. How could I forget?

 

Even my humour is being eroded by this monotony. I apologize.

my hair is bigger than

hip-hop.

all my friends

It seems that my world has recently exploded into a thousand wonderful pieces. Somehow, I was fortunate enough to emerge from my cloud of Coco Mademoiselle and Fitzgerald short stories to see the best sight there is: one David Decepida, who escaped from the likely miserable confines of communist China to America last week.

The arrival of Dave to American soil has implications that few can understand—namely, the momentous reunion of four people who once upon a time evaded the restrictions of time and space and ruled the planet, essentially. The aforementioned explosion occurred in (sweet home) Winfreyland around 7:30 PM last Tuesday when the geographically independent forces of Diana Benanti, J. Andrew Ivers, Decepida and I collided in such a way that it reminded me of ‘happy’ feels like.

It’s funny how one can forget that life used to be an easy, good time when friends and Colt 45s alike were close at hand. This day-to-day thing we endure, slow as it may seem, is spiraling out of my control and the resulting tornado is taking my irreplaceables away with it—more severely than it ever has before. I think James Murphy paralleled my current sentiment when he wrote, “You spent the first five years trying to get with the plan, and the next five years trying to be with your friends again.” The temporary glimpse of memory lane and how tomorrow is supposed to be is terribly fleeting every time and I’ve since become a piece of Scotch tape reconnecting with various other favorite pieces of tape and being ripped away from them all too soon, fast and hard. There just aren’t enough bottles or mix tapes or road trips or viewings of Gone with the Wind in the world to realize the potential of this short train of moments.

Where are your friends tonight?