The hour badly spent

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.

 To recap:

I drank a lot.

"Movies" were "viewed."

I borrowed my friend’s car and managed to avoid a moving violation.

I played rock band for the first time and was not impressed.

I hit the bars! Then I hit them again.

I quit smoking. Then I quit nonsmoking.

I had a blog smackdown! It was even more boring than it sounds.

I read some of Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Klay, and it’s pretty good. I didn’t get around to reading Twilight. Don’t tell Heather.

I revealed the presence of this awesome blog for the viewing pleasure of the teeming masses. The masses said "meh," then went back to listening to pop music and making out with each other.

And now, my hair looks different.

My best friend broke his right arm three weeks ago. Unable to drive a stickshift, he let me borrow his Mustang all week. You know what’s more fun than using a muscle car to pick up hot chicks?

Using a muscle car to run over hot chicks.

Over spring break, I drank at John’s house every night until Thursday. On Thursday Woody suggested we drink at the bars in downtown Long Beach, and I offered no protest.

Hours later, while Woody sat passed out, face down at a table in Dubliner’s Irish Pub, John and I scrutinized a nearby hipster.

“You don’t understand, John. That’s exactly my type. The dark-framed glasses; the no-nonsense bangs; the cherry-red lipstick; the heels; the arm tattoos; the leg tattoos; the skirt. Oh god, that skirt. On a related note, holy fuck, am I drunk, or is that is a nice pair of legs?”

“Yes to both of those, man.”

“Like, if she and I were to ever have sex, upon climax, the semen would stream out of me for hours and hours until finally there was nothing left of me.”

“I get the idea. Thanks for the visual. But what do you make of the unceasing swarm of dudes around her?”

“It does kind of take me back to a dark, lonely, miserable place. Remind me, what was that called?”

“Prom.”

“Right. I don’t think I like her so much any more.”