Tuesday, January 11, 2011

Reason Number &: Oreo Cookies and Unwieldy Poetic Frameworks

I think one of my greatest skills in life is ruining. I actually sneezed chocolate (a full five minutes after eating chocolate) onto one of my favorite shirts, a cream silk blouse with a nipped, slim fit that goes with just about everything, or did before I ruined it.

I also destroy even the most resilient shoes that, on another person, might remain pristine, unscathed by vicious sidewalks and precipitation.

On any given day, I have a rash.

I overuse mediocre, frivolous words like "extraordinary" and "humiliating" and "extreme" in both adjective and adverb form, and now that I've brought up adverbs I may as well admit they threaten to ambush my every utterance.

I will never understand how a person doesn't trip and fall at least once during the day. Forward movement is perilous, and often I don't see how it's done, in the literal sense that my glasses are fogged, or smudged, and I always forget to bring the right kind of cleansing cloth, and worsen the smudges with improper fabric like rayon. (cough, rayon is always an improper fabric)

Often, my upper lip gets stuck to my teeth when I smile at nothing, or at something that makes no sense to anyone around me.

I can never tell a not circuitous story, full of pauses, tangents, sideways glances into space.

I lost my virginity to a song from a Disney movie soundtrack. I'll let you guess which one. I would insist this was not my idea (it wasn't!!), but at this point the fact that I let it happen makes me just as guilty as the penis-wielder that pressed play.

What if I were to write a series of sestinas that is actually an enormous sestina?

What if my coat weren't always covered in cat hair?

What if I were to stop complaining right now?

I could, after all, be listening to Luther Vandross in a cold room.

Instead, I just ate two oreo cookies that reminded me to eat more oreo cookies, and often.

A man rang our buzzer, the reason being that he had an extra copy of our keys. He wanted a reward. "I could have stolen your plasma TV! Or your iPod!" he said. We don't have a plasma TV. But thanks random man for not stealing from me. And I mean that from the bottom of my heart.

ETA: Editing. A reason for gratitude. A way to make adverbs disappear, and melt reiterations, and just make things better. Can be repeated until things are better.


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