Just My $.95

Yup. That's what I have in the world right now. $.95. Oh, little decimal, what a difference though doth maketh. I spent my last five dollars on Sunday at the Shadyside Arts Festival, where I bought what was in reality a gallon of frozen lemonade. Much like lighting off fireworks, there's nothing quite as intangible as consuming your own cash. It's like how death and mortality is what truly gives anything value - and when you spend the last of it, the moments should be savored.

The lemonade was terrible, of course. I don't know why I always buy lemonade at festivals expecting it to be good. I might as well buy some sugar cubes, spit on them, and then grind them up with ice. This would probably be my advice to high school seniors, if someone were ever to ask me someday, just three little words that would inalterably change the course of young lives: Make your own.

My dad remarked today how he'd never been golfing with someone who only had $.95, to which I replied that I was usually the child taking him places he never thought he'd go: a ragtime festival in Missouri, the ER in Winter Park, FL, the dance floor at Donna's wedding. I think it was a kind of watershed moment in our relationship; I realized that even when I had absolutely nothing, I had everything I would ever need.

Jess is leaving on Sunday, which is a sentence that is weighing down all the other ones on this page. To commemorate, we spent the evening chowing down on italian ice and reading old e-mails to each other. She read hers out loud, and I would read my reply. It was even more fun when we acted out old IM conversations - it read something like a taut screenplay for a successful romantic comedy. I was Billy, she was Meg. It was strange to hear our new voices giving bodies to the old ones. These are mostly e-mails from 2000 and 2001, so the whole evening had the air of a mad scientist's experiment, a wormhole bursting open on her parents' couch and cramming the entirety of the time-space continuum of our experience together into one thin moment.

Me love you long time, crazy girl. This one-line paragraph is for you.

I'm going through laptop withdrawal. I don't know what I'm going to do when it heads home for the Springs. How will I write to you from my bed? How will I surf eBay and Amazon and Apple forums from the comfort of the sheets? I don't believe in wireless keyboards or meeces because of the quarter-second delay between intention and the screen. You know what I mean, that little, tiny moment between thought and word. It's like watching a video where the voice is out of sync with the mouth - I was born to perceive the subtlety, hard-wired to know the discrepancy, and it is maddening and I just want to poke at the screen with sharp things until it goes away.

Ditto with the wireless keyboard. Maybe I can do some case-study, submit my body for the betterment of my computing situation. I wonder how much silicon I'm really worth. The new Core 2 Duo is salacious...

Speaking of sex, I've been bummed recently because my documentary filmmaking class has been cancelled for the fall. No word yet as to why, but I'm really disappointed. I've had the feeling for a couple of months now that something, something big, was coming in the Fall that was going to re-angle my life, change its trajectory (the scary thing is I just totally Freuded on "trajectory" and initially spelled it "tragectory," which is of course my fear that the change will be painful). I was hoping it was the documentary class - come on, Universe, your poker face is too good.

I have a deck of tarot cards. You probably think different of me now after knowing that, but that's okay. I haven't dealt them out in awhile - sometimes the blinders are comforting - but I'm thinking I should find them and ask a few quick questions. Just two or three steps ahead, that's all I really need. They've never been wrong. They can't be wrong because they reveal what's within you; what you see in the images is what you are, so to speak. Nothing magical about it, just art eliciting reality, windows and soul and all that jazz. I'll let you know what they say.

In the meantime, stay classy, and if you read, friggin' comment. I'm off to my computer-less bed, wishing you all were in my lap.

Lurve,
M