The hour badly spent

You somehow managed to hail mary right over my trenchant social analyses and hone in on the *other* posts. Those in which I invoke defense mechanisms and feed my delusions of grandeur with alcohol; the posts in which I am pompous, childish, desperate and whiney; petty, self-indulgent, shallow, obnoxious, and worst of all, too prolix (my bad). And in so doing you found that secret thing which unravelled me. Umm, sorry about that whole business, by the way.

And what, exactly, was it? That business?

Yes, there was a party, months ago.

She noticed me. Asked me questions. Got my jokes, even the sly, insiderey one I threw out just to see if anybody was listening. And yes, whatever, I know it was mind-numbingly awful, just like 95% of my "jokes."

Where’d my drink go?
Oh, was that yours, on the table? I finished it off. Forgive me. It was delicious; so sweet, and so cold.
I know what you’re talking about, she said, looking right at me.
Do you now? I tilted my head.

And then, another night, she visited. Said all the right things. The sort of things you secretly always wanted someone to say to you? Those. "But how did she know?" I wondered afterward, dazed and smiling idiotically.

We partied in Lawrence one night. She invited me over some more; parties, get-togethers, studying, until by and by she didn’t. Then it was all missed phone calls, all sorts of excuses not to make dates, and then all of nothing.

As time wore on and the thing ran its course, I grew more ashamed angrier and angrier still with myself. I withdrew, even despite your kind efforts. Yours too, Sexy Communist Spy. Again, my bad.

In hindsight, this experience has helped me decide on something of great social imprtance which I’ve been mulling over for some time; I will no longer hit on any women under 40.

Except Dessa, of course.

I know what you’re thinking: "Finally! A real post! None of that "collegianism" wank we’ve been choking down since you got back from L.A. three days ago!" It’s taken that long for my spring break afterglow — more commonly known as "jetlag" — to subside. How long is that shit supposed to last, anyway? To be honest, though, I haven’t had a full night’s sleep in a while. Saturday I packed. Sunday I flew back to the Isle of Joy and promptly emailed the redheaded cutie I met weeks ago.

Geek girl,
How the hell are ya? Have a relaxing, uneventful spring break? Or did you go wild in Cancun and get caught on video? You don’t have to answer that. Wanna get together again one of these days? Soon? :-)

-Cheeky & Geeky

Then I promptly went over Madeline’s for no good reason, where we self-destructively watched Romeo & Juliet into the wee hours of the morning.

Monday I stayed up til four doing the homework I should have finished some time last week. Tuesday I went to a Writers’ Circle meeting - kind of an informal workshop for English majors - led by Jimbo and attended by Madeline, two guys I didn’t recognize, and one dude who read some wonderful, if depressing pieces at Poetry on Poyntz a month ago.

I passed around some of my doggerel, which I wrote by lighting up a cigarette at three in the morning, remembering a pretty girl, making up the prettiest run-on sentences I could think of about her, then inserting line breaks wherever the spirit moved me to do so. Jimbo said it felt like slam poetry (confession: never been to a poetry slam, have no idea what it is, will forget to google it by the time I finish this post), and they all seemed to like my submissions. Twenty minutes of relief from the inferiority complex!

Madeline read her work as well, but much too quickly. Sitting next to her, I noticed she paced herself by wagging her legs as fast as butterfly wings. She did her poems a supreme injustice; I think everything she writes is graceful and beautiful and brilliant, really; but it’s all paratactical, full of fragments. It’s like she’s describing a dismantled stained-glass window. A listener would need a moment to reflect, to thread each fragment in with the others, or else it’s impossible to make the whole image cohere.

"I can’t read poems out loud," she told me afterwards, over one of my Parliaments. I’m the same way. I learned from public speaking last semester that I should never speak in public again.

"Yeah, you were nervous."

She said she’d rather type up her material beforehand, send it to the other members, and have them critique it without having to read it.

"Absolutely not. If I’ve got to read, so do you." Justice for all, I say.

Today I am so tired that the room’s spinning weirdly (I haven’t drank since I was bumped up to first class on my flight Sunday). It’s kind of cool and kind of scary at the same time, because it could be a breezy altered state of mind, or it could be the beginnings of a brain tumor. Meh.

It took a few days, but the redheaded cutie finally wrote back:

Don’t worry; no one will be seeing lewd videos of me on the internet anytime soon. ^_^ [Editor’s note: Foiled again!]

Spring Break was awesome, although it was followed immediately by a wicked stomach flu. (Sorry I missed your call the other night; was busy vomiting.) This week, I need to chill out, and it looks like I have some stuff going on this weekend (game-intensive, I do tabletop every other weekend) but we should totally chill out sometime next week/weekend. I got the new remastered Blade Runner–have you seen it? It’s fucking phenomenal.
Hope you had fun on the homefront. We’ll chat at ya later!

- Redheaded cutie

What’s suspicious is that this exact thing happened years ago when I went to Mexico: a week of good times punctuated by Montezuma’s Revenge. Maybe my diarrhea has spent ten years migrating eastward from California and is finally proliferating throughout the Great Plains (Take that, red states!). What’s also suspicious is that when you translate "we should totally chill out sometime next weekend" from cutie to nerd it comes out as "I’m just not that into you."

Seriously, why is it impossible, when I ask, to get this response: "Sure, let’s hang. How’s tonight?" My theory: I don’t bathe often enough and smell like loser. "We know your kind," they are thinking. "You are socially inept!" Hence the lucrative offers: tepid promises of future phone calls that are never made, and vague references to getting together that never materialize! Well, with no girls to distract me (pornstars don’t count), now I can really focus on studying.

Since I haven’t blogged in a few days, that chart shall serve as a benchmark while I recap the week:

Monday: really don’t remember much, except for a couple of bloody marys. That is not a euphemism.

Wednesday: I made a new friend! A supercute 28-year old redheaded geek girl. No, not that supercute 28-year-old redheaded geek girl. Come to think of it, "romp" makes the whole thing sound way more sordid than it really was, which entailed going to Auntie May’s for happy hour, where we bought each other beers and made small talk. Then we walked around for a little bit. The great big city’s a wonderous toy, just made for a girl and boy. We turned Manhattan into an isle of joy! Okay, she walked me to the Digital Shelf, where we drooled over the anime section. One day she will appreciate Ranma 1/2 as much as I do. One day.

Later, I called the Poetess to tell her I made a new friend. She was feeling blue, and wanted company, so I obliged. I drank her box wine and had a long talk with her about the true meaning of friendship. As it turns out, hippies can love after all! Before I left, she let me have one of her uppers.

Friday: I asked Arianna to go a semi-formal dance put on by the Association of Residence Halls. It was held in the Union Ballroom, which is a pretty big place. Because of that, I was expecting to wall-to-wall hotties gyrating in slinky, knee-length dresses. So OF COURSE we arrive and it’s like 15 kids, awkwardly twisting around to the Spice Girls. No, we are not leaving, I told Arianna. She wore these incredibly pointy black shoes that mangled her feet and made movement difficult, but looked terrific. I was deeply moved by her suffering. She and I sat in the back of the room, not-so-silently judging everyone, and talked about the ungodly horror of high school dances, while waiting for the D.J. to play something slow and romantic because that’s why you go to dances in the first place. It didn’t happen, so after an hour, we left to hit up a better party. And OF COURSE as we were gathering our coats and our purses and our, ahem, man-purses, the Old Man Controlling Everything We Hear finally put on a slow number. I might have been able to talk Arianna into staying for three more minutes, but it was a country song, and by then my heart just wasn’t in it.

I had never been to the casa de supernerdy English Major Jimbo; so when I got to his basement, which had a bar and a bigscreen TV and and a bunch of geeks talking about Baldur’s friggin’ Gate and a wall full of action figures and computer circuitboards and a ceiling plastered with movie posters, I didn’t know whether to love Jimbo for having an awesome place, hate Jimbo for having an awesome place, or hate myself for loving Jimbo for having an awesome place, and the whole thing got even more confusing and beautiful after I pulled out the bottle of cheap whiskey I brought.

I met lots of new people, most notably a blonde girl from the theater department, who I thought was cute and intelligent. She was the lead actress in The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds, wherein she did this amazing thing with her voice that made her sound like a domineering 1930s WASP. She got bonus points when I found out Cherry hates her. Nevertheless, I am definitely leaving that one alone. Actresses are terrifying.

Saturday was Fake Patty’s Day in Manhattan. The real St. Patrick’s day falls during K-State’s spring break, so Aggieville celebrates it a week early while students are still in town. I fully intended to start the pubcrawl at 9 in the morning, when the bars open, but I was too hung over. I ended up lounging around all day long, then, at midnight, crashing a get-together at Madeline’s in celebration of the coming-to-town of her childhood friend Megan, who has apparently developed into a cute, aloof hipster.

A moment after I arrived, Jenna, Maddie’s awesome roommate; Jenna’s boyfriend Graham, who is also awesome, and Megan, decided to hit the bars. Despite the fantasticity of Jenna and Graham, along with my typically asinine outbursts of wit, we were unable to stop Megan from sitting around, pouting, and looking bored. Thankfully she left and returned to Madeline’s place on her own, before she completely killed my buzz and ruined my life.

One day, the summer we
lived together, I found,
tucked like a whisper, between
pages one hundred thirty-eight,
and one hundred thirty-nine, of
“Handmaid of Desire,”
an old snapshot of you,
which you are never, ever
getting back.

I.
Late at night, you
used to take me
by the hand and,
voice like a halo,
say those three little words:
Come to bed.
How did you ever do that?
What kind of magic makes a whisper glow?

II.
The best part
about having a girl with glasses
always came
right before you took all your clothes off
slid into bed
draped your leg over my hip
and we’d made love;
right before that, when you’d
set your glasses on
the nightstand.

III.
That spring night, when you
wearing that nimbus-white nightgown,
fiddling with your fingers, sat up, because you
couldn’t sleep;
That was the night you told me you loved me for the first time.

That fire-red hoodie,
Those sparkly slippers;

Your virgin-white nightgown.

The cut-off denim miniskirt, on which,
while you drove, I liked to put my hand -
Not-so-secretly
loving
the pleasant resistance of your thigh
underneath the fabric;

Also, the longer one, the dark gypsy skirt, which, each time you put on,
you’d show off for me with a flourish
and a smile.

And that smile: it really went with the skirt.
Perfectly.