I figured it out. I've been stepping on cracks because I'm too busy to be obsessive and drive myself insane with tics. When my mind is happily focused on counting and recounting the billion-and-a-half things that are due in the next ten minutes, it can't fit other compulsiveness into the equation. That or my tics are just changing again. Either way I'm glad to see this one go.

Note of Interest: Edward Norton is playing Lionel Essrog in the upcoming film version of Motherless Brooklyn. I. Can't. Fucking. Wait.

The temperature just dropped about ten degrees for no reason. I hate cold so much it hurts. Or it would hurt if I could feel my toes.

Girls' Day Out with the madre and abuela was fun. A lot of fun.

I feel sorry for people who need to get trashed to have fun. Unless they lecture me on the bus because I'm sober on a Saturday night. Then they can fuck themselves.

I just fell asleep (passed out) on my keyboard for a half hour. Now my hands are asleep and my contacts are dry and I'm going to bed.

~~~~~

Standing Still

She stood on both feet and didn�t fidget at the funeral as they played the soft music and it intermingled with the continual clearing of throats because it was cold season. And the adults clucked around her, hugging her and assuring her that Gramma was in heaven now... but she was already seven years old and knew about the world and had a sneaking suspicion that Gramma had not been a heaven-bound lady. Years later she would remember the stories more than anything else, but right now she could only stare at the placid Mary Kayed face from behind the giant yellow wreath sent by The Sanders, who were Sorry For Your Loss.

The painted eyebrows remained un-knitted, the wizened face a hundred times folded in on itself lay quiet and relaxed for the first time in the seven years she knew. Maybe a hundred more, though; probably a hundred, a million even, as far back as years go. She had been playing Barbies too close to the television once when she heard a man on the screen yelling about how the evil ones live forever but the good ones always die young, and she would never know why, but it stayed with her. She was reminded of him now, frightening her with his flying spittle and wild green eyes, crazed with what looked like hunger but could have been passion or vengeance or any number of things seven-year-olds don�t care about.

He frightened her like watching the lumbering tear-stained adults through the curtain of cheerful flowers frightened her. But it seemed to soothe them to soothe her, to pat her hair and reassure her that things were going to be okay, so she let them grasp her shoulders and rumple her itchy black dress as she tried not to scratch. She knew it was important not to scratch; being seven and skinny and doe-eyed was about keeping up appearances. The towering, incomprehensive adults, one blurring into the other, always told her they remembered being her age but she knew better than that. When she played pretend she knew in the end that it wasn�t real, but it never seemed the adults realized the difference between fantasy and truth.

But just as well as she knew the kind of thick, white tights that were now bunching around her knees would never come near any daughter of hers, she knew the hulking, omnipresent adults needed her to be ignorant in order for the world to stabilize. And she wanted very much for the world to be righted and work as it should, where adults didn�t cry and she wore pants. So. Gramma went to heaven and that made her sad, but she didn�t understand fiery speakers on the news and her new white tights made her feel like such a pretty princess. And things were going to be okay.

ink :: graphite