Decorating

Home decorating 101. It's time to decorate your babies room. Nothing says welcome to our family like a bunch of wall decals and maybe a picture of some friendly looking monkeys. I mean, when I was a baby I remember being extraordinarily excited to check out the new digs that I was in. It was amazing, here you go from being packed like a sardine into a uterus out into the big world. And, after the crying ceases, it's pretty great to see all of the trouble that your parents went to while you were in the womb. Though I distinctly remember thinking, I wouldn't have gone with that particular shade of green, perhaps misting fine rain would have been better. Except that I didn't have any of these thoughts because I was a baby. And babies can't see a damn thing.

Thus, inspired by the craze, I blame Martha Stewart, of decorating your baby's room as though they are a new tenant and you really want them to rent S stared showing me pictures of rooms on HGTV's web site. The rooms all have names like "Warm and Woodsy" or child inspired names like "Presley's Place" or "Roman's Empire." The sad part about looking at these rooms is that their often dotted with pottery barn furniture that we can't afford, and the occasional walk in closet, which is a must have for a newborn. Thus, I know that the only way that we can compete is to name our room something equivalently obnoxious. My first idea was to have a room with a crib, a changing table, and a dresser. I thought we could call it "Cold and Functional." For some reason S doesn't think that's the best name. Thus, we're stuck trying to come up with something cutesy.

What about Brayden's bear cave? No.

This picture sort of creeps me out for no good reason. Maybe because it's so old-timey. On the other hand it reminds me of when we were kids, and we'd want to cover our whole room in blankets to turn it into a cave. The whole project would take hours, or what seemed like hours, I don't know, time is different for kids, and we'd finally have it all set up and then some books would fall, or we'd realize that it was too hot, and everyone would end up leaving the room behind after half an hour or so, spending far less time enjoying the cave than we did in building it, and I'm certain that there was a lesson somewhere in building that giant cave of blankets, but I haven't discovered it yet. Perhaps that we should have thought ahead and brought AC?

Howard's hall of mirrors. Granted I don't think the name Howard has been used in a few decades but that's some pretty solid decorating you could do with that. Model the whole thing after Versailles.

Let's empty the bank account and make other couples jealous. Nothing says I love you to a child like giant hall of mirrors. Hopefully these mirrors will all be reflecting giant clowns or something else even scarier. I jest. Nothing is scarier than clowns.

I've run out of ideas because I can't quite find a viable name/theme mix. Although, I'm not trying particularly hard. Hmm.
David's Dump? Don't kids like dump trucks and stuff? Okay, clearly a bad idea, but I stumbled on this gem.


You supply the name, and I'll supply the carriage/child.

I guess when it comes down to it I just have a hard time parsing between the need to "nest," which is attributed to women and the obvious external influences of things like Martha and HGTV et al.Before I go any further let it be said that I am guilty of engaging in suspect behavior like avidly watching sports teams that would have been absolutely impossible to do really before the advent of television. Back in the day you checked your favorite team's outcome in the newspaper box score. So, I don't know if we're planning a wonderful room because we want our baby to be a part of our family or whether we're planning our baby's room to be perfect because you're supposed to plan a baby's room to be perfect. It's probably somewhere in between the two, and I'd even harbor a guess that it's leaning more towards the former than the latter.

I suppose it is one of those scenarios when it's probably best to just say uncle and get out of the pin as it's something I can't relate to that well. I want our child to have a wonderful life. For me that means buying a crib, a changing table, a dresser and a chair and putting them in the room. And, if they don't work in the particular configuration that we place them, then I'd probably just move them. Then again, the whole point is mostly moot because I am in no way shape or form a planner. My idea of planning is to wait until the last minute and then do things in a flurry of activity in which at least one critical item gets broken. My role is probably just to move things and to remind S (not that she needs it that much)that we won't need everything to make our baby loved. We probably just need to love it. And by that I mean, diapers, copious amounts of diapers.

Something that needs some work

At least I wasn’t born without a sense of humor, was the sort of thing that he’d say, when you got to be that age when you felt like you had to answer for something that you didn’t have a damn thing to do with. Technically he had tactile anesthesia. People were always asking him questions like, what he missed most about not being able to touch. And it was the sort of thing where you could tell that people wanted him to say something like a hug, or a good night kiss. And so he generally responded with something like, “I miss hugging my mother.”

It was the sort of response that turned folks misty eyed, and sometimes he got a little misty eyed as well. He pretty much always cried when other people did. It was a weakness. What he really missed though, he thought, as he rocked in that old white chair his daddy had picked up and hauled back from the dump, with the screws loose in the back, but still, a damn fine piece of furniture, was something he had never touched at all. He thought, or rather he guessed, that he’d like to touch a woman’s chest. It seemed a shame to him that he’d never really be able to.

Breast Pumps

S told me that I was supposed to blog about breast pumps. Unfortunately, as she possesses the necessary accouterments for the item I haven't done any research. And, while she was doing research I decided to take a nap. Sometimes when life gets you down and you have like six things to do, it feels great to take a nice nap and then wake up and wonder what you're doing with your life. Anyhow, I managed to take in about one picture before I dozed off. Breast pumps look like some sort of cone shaped thing that you might see adorning the decolletage of Lady Gaga in some crazy ass video. Apparently the highlight of these ads for breast pumps is that they show women going about all sorts of normal tasks while pumping. Breast pump, the ultimate tool for multi-tasking! Pump while you e-mail! Pump while you jog! Pump while you pump! (Incidentally doing a Google image search to try and rediscover the earlier Lady Gaga like photo doesn't net anything like the cone shaped thing you saw, but a really practical looking plastic bottle that is mostly reminiscent of a spray bottle. Also pictures of women nursing, which, I guess that's what I'm headed for, strange).


Really the contraption, not surprisingly is essentially reminiscent of something you'd expect to see on a dairy farm underneath a cow's udder. But now I know. And if I learned anything from watching G.I. Joe as a child it's that knowing is half the battle. The other half of the battle is fighting off the vague feeling that you should have been something else regardless of what you're doing. Trying to expunge that feeling through various mediums while working at a nine to five job that you find mostly rewarding, though occasionally, derivative and so on...

Now that I've begun blogging about breast pumps without having any actual information I've come to the conclusion that it was a bad idea.

S: If I had a blog I'd blog about breast pumps.

Well, this one's for you because I, willfully, still don't know anything. I do know that I occasionally enjoy writing fiction. Even if it doesn't always come to anything.

Meta-Fiction for funsies

Now, if I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a hundred times, is not a great way to start a story. A great way to start a story would be to include something about a man without a face, or maybe he’s lost the sense of touch. He’d probably have some issues with his father. Most people have issues with their father, and it would give him something akin to depth. I think I’m going to go with the touch one because I once watched a movie starring Chevy Chase, an actor that nobody recognizes anymore, in which he did not have a face. I don’t really remember if it played any sort of essential role in the plot, and I have a vague memory of what looked like a giant sock over his entire face. Or not face.

Anyhow, this boy, let’s go ahead and call him Kevin. I’ve never been particularly fond of the name Kevin, and I figured that by naming him that, we could feel better about taking away his sense of touch. I mean, there he is, just being born into the world, and already he’s lost his sense of touch. Tragic that. Let’s put our heads together and see if we can come up with a scenario where Kevin’s disability puts him at some sort of disadvantage.

Kevin is sitting on the front porch of a house, it should probably be white. The grass is verdant and green, probably Bermuda by the looks of it. Kevin has got an amazing sense of sight and hearing and other stuff to compensate for his inability to sense that he is touching things. He’s got some scars on his hands and forearms from some mistakes he’s made with plates and green tea kettles and the like over the years, nothing major.

The grass is about ankle high and his mother, oh yeah he’s got a mother, has mentioned that if he don’t do nothing about it soon that she’s libel, her mispronunciation, to put down a canoe and start paddlin away. Kevin, like most of us, you and me included, isn’t really that fond of mowing the lush verdant lawn that is most likely Bermuda grass. He kind of thinks that it’s a crappy chore to have to do during the summer, and he occasionally harbors resentment at all that green lawn, and imagines setting fire to it, rest assured, he’s not really that sort of guy, he’s just got what I’ll call a rich imagination.

On the expectations of parents, defensiveness, and why the sonogram lady was probably a terrible person

S: Did you eat a peach today? We need to get rid of them.

M: No. Are you going to impeach me. (Sigh)

Later

M: I can't find a place to put the apple juice?

S: Why? Note: Earlier in the day she made fresh strawberry jam, canned and refrigerated it).

M: It looks like you just jammed things in here. (Sigh)

One of the biggest fears of any parent is that their particular child is going to be some kind of massive failure when it comes to life. Why? Because the child not only has to live up to but surpass all the unfulfilled dreams of their parents. At least the good parents. A lot people will tell you to let the kid be an individual and all that crap, but as we know, in general people are kind of insipid. Ergo; why not transfer all of your latent dreams and desires on that little ball of potential? I can't find any compelling reason not to.

That's probably why the second sonogram was a tough experience for us. The lady who was helping was turned out to be somebody who worked in the gulags in Stalinist Russia. Though she'd learned to mask her accent and appear to be like forty years younger. The problem was that at the second sonogram the Rusky needed the baby to flip into particular positions in order to verify that the tadpole had a heart and lungs or something. I don't know, I'm not a doctor, I just watch them on television. So handsome.

Anyhow, during the sonogram it takes a while for the image of the baby to appear. At first it just appears to be some sort of alien inhabiting a tiny part of space. Eventually it materializes, and you hear the heartbeat and you start to have feelings welling up within you that you usually only save for Michigan Football games and a really great episode of Friends. The latter is a lie. That show is/was vapid. Well, just after these feelings have begun to subside the babushka starts complaining about our child. Apparently our little squid decided that it would be a good time to practice his/her breaking skills and thus, he/she (let's just go with he for a while) was standing on his head and refusing to move.

Rather than being impressed by the amount of time that our child was performing a pretty solid headstand the middle aged harridan asked Stephanie to shake her hips in order to move the child. I don't know much about babies, but I thought that shaking them was pretty low on the things you're supposed to do list. I thought about making some sort of quip about British nannies but reconsidered because people who have been in Siberia don't really have senses of humor. Thus, she put S up to shaking her hips in a manner that I can only describe as troubling. Thank god our child refused to move, standing steadfastly on his head through this whole ordeal. That a way, kid, I valiantly thought in our little one's direction.

Eventually the nice sonogram lady left, throwing up her hands in disgust at our child's inability to properly align himself. And truthfully, I felt a little defensive. And I had the slightest glimmer of why parents would come into to talk to me when I worked with kids and claim that their child was a good boy and that they couldn't understand what the problem was? Well, the problem is, the kid is a pain in the ass. However, when it's your own unborn child working on a solid yoga pose you feel a bit defensive. You feel like saying, "Look lady, that kid is not disappointing, it is beautiful just the way it is." While at the same time you're a little disappointed that your sprout is a little slow on the uptake and that the shakes weren't induced in order to increase the difficulty level of the pose, but rather, that some sort of movement was required.

The now exasperated sonogram lady came back inside and our little blob of squid moved in the requisite positions. And we walked out into the light of the day and wondered if our child was always going to be so stupid....kidding. Can you believe that lady?

I was reminded this evening of this kick ass song by Semisonic called "Closing Time," except that it is the worst song in the world for people of a certain age because it was played at least twice an hour for a period of about three years during the years before iPods when all you had was the radio, and they just kept playing f-ing closing time. So, to those of you of a certain age, sit back and listen to this piece of shi- song for the one millionth time in your life.

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How to prepare for a child

A guy's guide to pregnancy.

Your wife is going to consistently ask you if you love and care about the baby that she is carrying around in your stomach.

Answer: This strategy is designed to trap you. A similar tactic is used by blowfish, bears, and mermaids in holding on to their mates. That said, it is best to tell your wife that you love the baby as much as she does, despite the lack of a protrusion coming from your non-existent uterus. Don't mention that it actually feels slightly different for you not having the child growing inside you, and that, right now, things seem kind of the same. This is a bad strategy. After leaning down and kissing her belly, you should start carrying a sack of flour around on your stomach affixed by duct tape to indicate your solidarity with the whole child rearing thing. And, if you're ever short on flour while making cookies you can just eat your baby.

It is also important that you display your love and affection by doing things like registering at Babies R' Us and requesting that everything in the house be baby-proofed. Use the term baby proofed as often as possible. Use it both as a joke and as something serious. This will show her that you're both ready to be a father but not too stressed out about the prospect and that you'll be the same handsome and fun-loving guy she married years ago. "We better buy those "thingies" you put over the wall sockets." Use the word "thingies" to describe outlet covers because it will make you sound concerned, but not so concerned that you're going around learning the names of new things. This will reassure her that you won't steal too much of her thunder. Then say something like, "We'd better baby proof the television." This joke, babies are too dumb to understand television, will set her at ease.

During the process of registering insist that everything be Euro Style. Don't confess to not having any idea what this means. Doggedly attack various strollers that don't seem to have Euro styling. Tell her that you'd always pictured yourself, since like the age of eight, imagined yourself pushing around a certain type of stroller. This will reassure her that you've always wanted to be a father, but that you're not so much of a sissy that you won't enforce your will on something like stroller buying if you so choose. This may arouse a passion so great in her that you might even kiss, though in all likeliehood you'll just be asked to pat her belly. Take what you can get you greedy bastard.

After she's finished registering for a bunch of stuff sit down on the couch and watch her scroll through every picture. Don't just say, "Oh, that looks good." That is the sort of laziness that she doesn't want to see. Pick out something specific, say, "That vegetable stuffed animal has extremely cute eyes. Look at those eyes, hon." This will let her know that you're not just bs-ing but that you're really and truly interested in this process of making a home for the baby.

When she says that you need to move everything from the future baby room into the other bedroom jump at the chance to help. Now is not the time to whine about your torn labrum or bum knees. It is time to lift heavy things and put them down in an uncareful manner in other rooms. It is important that you do this so she will see a display of raw masculinity coupled with the sort of carelessness that will assure her that your boy, if it's a boy, won't grow up to be a sissy. On second thought, if you're having a girl, set the heavy items down carefully to show that you're not some big stupid gorilla.

Further Advice Coming.
Fiction
The apartment is typically clean and well-lit, though the lights have been dimmed to enhance her concentration. The living room window is split in the middle by a thick metal girder, twelve inches in diameter, which bisects her view into two relatively large panoramas. She typically raises the blinds between the hours of 5:40 and 8:30 P.M. to watch people on the street below. The blinds are currently listing together with the slow rhythm of the fan. In one corner of the living room is a potted plant with three foot long yellowing palm fronds, fronds that in stretching towards the light from the window have begun to overreach themselves and are now hanging at forty five degree angles too weighty for the branches and are bowing heavily. Her bookcase is made of cheap plywood and is full of books, which are primarily about literature. She has several silver rimmed picture frames. One of them has a picture of a cat.

She can also fly, in the daydream, which makes the whole process even more complex because she could just float there regardless, adjusting the rope accordingly. People had done worse things for love.

In order to breathe correctly, her guru had told her, his mole moving up towards his nostril with each syllable, this conversation taking place at some mid-point of the erasure process, she was supposed to count from one to ten. This counting was supposed to help free her from the burden of thought. A single man is walking on the street below in what appeared to be a black or navy blue blazer. His shoulders are square, and his short haircut and ramrod posture are suggestive of a military background. He fumbles with his keys before getting into his car. Perhaps he is handsome. She can’t really tell.

She finds the process of holding her thoughts still to be like asking someone to hold a Rubik’s cube without even attempting the slightest correction in favor of symmetry. In the third grade, she had been unable to pass the entrance exam into the gifted and talented class because she had no facility with shapes and congruencies. She remembers the failure well, and complexly, because it was her first brush with what she would now call despair.

The sky is beige. Most of the heavy late afternoon light is being obscured by the entwined and full branches of deciduous trees.


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Changing my Mind

I am, on occasion, wrong. Mind you, this happens so infrequently that I generally mark the occasion on a piece of paper that I keep next to my bed, and I dare say I haven't had to turn the page in years. I believe I started keeping a record due to some obscure misreading of a Biblical passage in which it turns out to be true, in the Latin of course, that one is to keep a record of right and wrongs. The former list, however, would run as long as that scroll of clean animals that came down from the heavens in Acts. Ergo; I desisted immediately in deference to the rain forests.

We should probably start talking about the error my ways by discussing how I approach an argument, or, discussion if you'd prefer. Mind you, these "discussions" are infrequent occurrences in my life except with those that I am the closest, as for some reason I so often find their opinions in need of correction. It probably has to do with a charitable desire in me that is constantly thwarted in my job at the library that I feel I must have an outlet for. And so, I give when I can.

I approach an argument as a general does a "total war." I do not head into thinking that there is any possibility that I am wrong. This head strong sort of arguing is characteristic of people over the age of about twenty-five, as it is customary to start calcifying a bit in one's views of the world. In truth, we don't change much, though there is much to recommend to travel and falling in love when it comes to amending one's view of the world.

This style of argument can occasionally, mind you, only with those I know well, if I don't know you well enough I'm likely to just nod along while you proclaim an opinion such as, white wine being superior to red, or, the Russians shallow in spirit, and too long. But if I am comfortable enough I march like the French army under Napoleon through Russia in the depths of winter. Why? People always mark that as his major failure, however, what failure is there for a man who is still being studied in history books? He's almost more well known for his failings, in that we can find something that puts us on common ground.

The unfortunate part about wintering in Russia is that you don't always bring the right gear. Thus, your supply lines get cut, and well, just read War and Peace, and mind you everyone prattles on about how the war sections are interminable, but what in life isn't interminable? Who remembers the second grade. My God, the war sections are as nothing when compared to the time between first recess and lunch.

The point is that sometimes when I engage in an argument I have my supply lines cut. Thus, when I reach back for that fact that is going to stunningly amend my adversaries opinion I find myself grasping at air. Inevitably, this just makes me more upset as no one likes to be thought of as a fool, especially by oneself. Thus, I rage on into the Russian winter, not stopping until I reach the very gates of Moscow itself. And I burn it to the ground, and watch ashes settle in snow. But the victory turns out to have been hollow and misleading. And I have to head home, or to work, and ask a few questions as perhaps Napoleon did.

"Did we win the battle?"
"Yes, sir."
"But we've lost the war haven't we?"

Reader's Digest version of the events.

I proclaim that when a child wakes up in the middle of the night that only one parent, whoever is providing service, should wake up. A bunch of women in the room make guffawing noises. Naturally this troubles me, as I tend to get my ire raised by proto-feminist movements largely based on what has happened in the past. I don't see any reason why I should behave illogically in modern times because our society used to be (I know, argue away on that) particularly sexist. Thus, whoever can provide the child the needed item, (and at this point I volunteered to feed half and half or whatever) should probably be the one to wake up. I believed the adherence to a strict two parents must be awake rule an outmoded way of thinking, attributable to a latent sexism that arises in feminism. Ie, all must be equal even if it doesn't make a lick of a sense. The three women in question vociferously disagreed.

As it turns out, and that's why you want to maintain those supply lines, it's nearly impossible to sleep while the child is crying. Thus, both parents are up anyway, it's only a matter of who is more awake. Again, I just wish I had the money for a wet nurse. I'm just putting it out there. So, my idea, which was probably still correct, I'll go to my grave on that one, won't really work. So perhaps I'll have to go back with an eraser and remove that mark in the ledger on the wrong side of the column. I was right, just not right enough. As I always say, "It takes a big man to admit that he's wrong. But it takes an even bigger man to rationalize that being wrong back into him being right."


Fiction (Cont.)


If he didn’t return…Hart Crane made some sense at the very least. Cruise ships themselves were depressing enough, without someone beating you up for your sexuality. His gadar, not at all the term being used contemporaneously, having been peculiarly misaligned clearly. On this one particular visit, in fact, just this very morning, she had noted that the bookshelves in his office are full, slight traces of dust on the covers reminded her of her father. Who, the father, used to sit and read the evening newspaper after work and needed complete silence to do so. The kids, her sister and her, just being kids and occasionally making enough noise while playing house or fighting over the possession of My Little Ponies, the ownership rights not really having been hammered out properly due to their proximity in age, that they were forcibly removed from the room and pretty much locked in the study until his reading was complete. The light in the study was always dusty, due to darkly colored velour lamp shades and a north facing window. Where, truth be told, the two girls had a great deal of child variety fun playing games and acting out little scenes that typically involved the dusty books that Mommy had brought with her into the marriage from Smith. Mommy not being the name that Rebecca would use to refer to her mother now. It wasn’t that sort of relationship.

He had a mole on his upper lip, which moved rhythmically in his speech upwards in a way that she thought may have occluded one of his nasal passages. It was the sort of thing where she couldn’t help wondering why he didn’t have it taken off. Wondering this, even as he is calmly explaining the very real virtues of attempting to reach inner Zen. His eyes were: small, brown, and intensely focused. The whole scenario involved at least one other passenger, for logistics sake, just to keep flying the thing. The mole was either some complex entity that was tied to his self-worth, a veritable tattoo of his unwillingness to conform to externality, or he didn’t own any mirrors. She briefly considered the possibility that it was to serve as a distraction technique, the mole, to test the concentration of new devotees. She dismissed this out of hand.

She had a moderately complex relationship with her father, who unwittingly often demeaned her educational career. To his knowledge she had studied something about Shakespeare being gay. He had a red scar on his left hand that he had gotten at some point during his brief period as a bachelor in the early nineteen seventies. In old pictures, he often appeared surprised by the camera. She did not know if that was common for pictures in that era.

Everyone always referred to that ghastly story about the oven and everyone it seemed had read “The Bell Jar,” but no one ever thought of Georgette Agutte. “He left twelve hours ago. I’m late.” Her cat is playing with a small ball that rings when he pushes it. Rebecca wasn’t the sort of person to go in for sentiment, but she considered that particular incident to be something approaching art itself. Her neighbor’s door opens and closes, causing her heart rate to jump by fifty two beats per minute.
During that first meeting she had mentally carved away at the space on his upper lip, until the mole was entirely removed. Jaws swam in small circles, which was really all the space he was afforded. In removing the mole, she had been forced to take away part of his lips as well, and he was now a pair of talking eyes with no mouth to speak of. The irony was duly noted internally. When she was younger, her sister had filled out around the age of fourteen. Her own chest had remained decidedly spare and fence postish despite all of her mental encouragement. Some nights, when she was only fifteen herself, the sisters being a mere fourteen months apart and her father being snipped shortly thereafter as her mother called it, she had lain awake and stared at her sister’s body. One evening, fairly early on, going so far as to rise from bed and tip toe across the thankfully carpeted room and stand just over the newly formed mounds of flesh that rose and fell so rhythmically from her sister’s sleeping form. And at some point literally cupping her hands together and holding them over her sister, feeling the tops of the fattened flesh coalescing in her hands, feeling at that moment, a soul wrenching envy that she suspected she had never quite shaken entirely. Her sister had perhaps not even been sleeping, she suspected now, but had just enjoyed the feel of her new body being held.

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

I'm guessing that a lot of people eventually runs up against one of those days when it occurs to them that they may have made a huge mistake. And no, I don't mean that in the sense of the child itself, who, from the sonograms I've seen is at least very adept at standing on its head, but rather whether we're ready to have a kid. It brings to mind that old complaint that people need a license to drive a car but nothing in the world to bring a baby.

I'm guessing that good old C.S. Lewis kind of already hit the nail on the head when it comes to my own particular troubles with future child rearing, which is, selfishness. How in the world am I going to put myself aside and focus on another living entity that is going to require so much of me? I've no earthly clue. I've always said that I wish I was born in another century but perhaps, for good measure, I should have made myself rich as well. That way, I could continue to maintain my current policy of, I love kids as long as they are behaving, and I don't have to wake up with them in the middle of the night. It's a pretty good policy. The only real major drawback is that it's way too selfish for having a kid. Sigh.

And quite frankly, I'm the sort of person who is highly dependent on copious amounts of free time in order to maintain certain aspects of my life. I mean, I only manage to write after S has gone to bed because I wake up a little later. However, in the last couple of months I've started giving up an hour of sleep to make sure that I get some fiction writing done as well. And I'm well aware of the myriad of jokes that accompany the arrival of a child about losing sleep. So, I guess the question is, what goes out the window? (And we're just going to right off the bat eliminate the idea that the baby is the thing that goes out the window).

I should probably sit down at a desk right now and map out my current schedule and figure out where the slack is and try and determine how I can squeeze all of the things I "want" to be doing into the space that I'll have left in between fits of crying babies. And sometimes when I'm expressing my discomfort about our impending situation, unlike S, who cries, I tend to drop some f-bombs and get a little mad at the world. And I don't suppose that's the sort of thing that you do in front of children, so it's just one more thing that goes out the window, and I suppose that I'll just have to assume that these things are going to pay off. That it's going to make me a better and more patient person, and that our own little offspring will feel very loved and cared for. And then, one day, grow up to be an adult who slightly resents us and somehow perceives the attendant bitterness that arose with all the things that I had to give up, and I'll turn off my hearing aid and smile at a blank white wall, imagining a statue that I saw by the artist Michelangelo, a Pieta, in which he is one of the men holding the body of Christ.

Fiction (Cont).
The current sky is an almost ethereal blue. The large apartment buildings across the street are showing the first shadows of sundown. She’s not certain if she is sitting Indian style or not. She’s not sure if the term is still in use or if it carries some negative racial connotation. The abstract nature of the suicide thing occurred in a state that could probably be called day dreaming, which includes all of the attendant haziness and general drunken feeling that one has in a daydream, which makes the details hard to relate with anything approaching accuracy. As a child, she had always assumed that the term referred to Native Americans, but now she thought that it probably meant Indians. She considered shootings to be the least tragic, or at least something not as emotively effective. She wondered if it should have been affective. An analog clock on the wall behind her kept time strictly. She was playing the if then game based upon his return.

Rebecca had met with the little Indian man that Joan had recommended as often as possible. He had a large desk constructed of some dark wood and inlaid with a gold colored metal alloy. The desk had a fish bowl, mostly full, with blue pebbles that rose about two sevenths of the way up into the total bowl space. A small castle is nestled on top of the pebbles on the left side of the bowl. At its apex, the castle reaches a height that is slightly smaller than the fish itself. A sign next to the fish, which appears to be an angelfish, reads, “Say hi to Jaws.” The fish is striped in yellow and black, and occasionally presses its face against the glass like an amused toddler. A statue of an elephant sits at a right angle to the tank. She knows it is some sort of Hindi god, the lowercase “g” here is hers.

The bizarre suicide thing had not just involved weights and strings but a run in with something that may or may not have been Big Ben, Rebecca herself, only having seen the clock on post cards. The death itself perhaps just occurring with a clock’s loud chiming in the background, providing the relevant knell. She did not believe in reincarnation, of that she was sure. In some religions, the Christian one most prominently, and that being the one with which she was most familiar, suicide was considered a venal sin. Her guru was short, and actually from some indeterminate country. He spoke English with the slight pauses and apparent amiability of most people she had met from India. He was Nepali.

Her skin color is generally off white, but she’s currently something more akin to red, due to the strain of not thinking. She has a red blotch on her neck that is shaped somewhat like the People’s Republic of Congo. She guesses that most of the people on the street below are lovers as lonely people sometimes do.

Long pieces of fiction in which nothing really happens alternatively titled, why did I spend my time writing this or Can I get a refund on that MFA

Rebecca is sitting on the living room, her legs are crossed in a lotus position, opposite heel placed on the opposed thigh. The heel is pressing into the flesh of her upper thigh in a way that is leaving a mark vaguely reminiscent of a child’s fingers imprinted into Play-doh. The carpet’s color almost matches the eggshell of the couch. If her fiancé comes back home tonight, she is going to make him dinner. She vaguely considers doing this naked, but recoils at the idea of nudity in the kitchen. The couch is oriented in the traditional American manner, facing a nineteen inch Toshiba television. The blank television’s screen is reflecting the couch’s own eggshell back at itself. Her back is resting against the right arm of the couch, and her left shoulder is parallel to the full length window that overlooks an arterial street of Silver Spring, MD. She keeps picking out random men, and assigning her fiancés particular walk or gestures to them. She is considering suicide, but doing so abstractedly, allowing it to move through her mind in wave like fashion, ebb and flow. The people on the street below are moving tributarily from office buildings and into the parking garage.

She is secretly thrilled by the anonymity of looking out at a window. An oscillating fan is raising slight goose bumps on her arms despite the interior heat of the room, which is approximately 82 degrees. The room’s temperature and relative humidity make its condition something close to viscous. The thoughts themselves are abstract, and occasionally involve bizarre scenarios. The dramatic suicidal reflection is the sort of thing that her fiancé would recognize and accurately categorize as her need to be raised from the grey mass of humanity and be “special.” Most of the suicidal scenarios that she has created are too complex and yet indistinct to be described successfully. One of them involves a hot air balloon.

She had started searching for inner peace a week ago. She’d been reading a book in the library staff lounge about artists who had taken their own lives: pistols and ovens, things of that sort. She had finished her leftovers from the previous evening’s late meal, an overcooked tofu and brown rice medley. Her white plastic fork had been hanging precariously from the lip of her Tupperware. The vending machine had been making noises that resembled a small dog’s growl.

One of the men on the street had certainly been her fiancé until he had crossed the street and kissed some other woman. It appeared to her that at that exact moment, he became someone else. If she had to do it all over again, would she? She wasn’t sure if she meant life or the relationship, or the affair. She is focusing intently on drawing her ribs apart and then back together like an accordion. The breathing technique that is being practiced is in accordance with the techniques that her guru had showed her. Who, her guru, would be disappointed if he knew she was even considering suicide, all be it abstractedly. She guessed.

The shades are open and the light is heavy in the room. The sun’s angle leaves her ankles warm while shading her upper torso as she gazes at the third shelf of her book case. The bookcase, which runs the length of the foreshortened far wall, is roughly parallel to the couch’s orientation in the room. The foreshortened walls terminus is at an arched doorway that leads into the apartment’s single room. Her fiancé had threatened something about never coming back before storming out. She had visions of fiery car crashes that were influenced by old music videos from the early 2000’s. She imagined the camera, probably filmed in some sort of uniform blue, catching the pure agony of her face as she races towards the flaming wreckage. Her eyes are blinking rapidly enough that she could be mistaken for someone in the REM cycle of sleep. A blossom floats by, white, near weightless.

The apartment smells of vanilla incense mixed with kitty litter. A few people are walking on the street below, mostly in pairs. The kitty litter smell is fainter than it is in most houses, her mother having bought her a mechanical hand that removes the offending excrement and re-distributes the litter evenly. The hand, she supposes, truly having a shitty job. In general, the people appear to be walking in close enough proximity to be arm in arm, but that could just be her not looking directly at the street, but rather only catching things out of the corner of her eye. She shouldn’t really be observing the street at all, vis a vis her attempt at inner peace, if truth be told. She didn’t think about it often enough to cause any real concern. The near wall on the couch’s left hand side has an 8x14 inch reproduction of Van Gogh’s “Starry Night.”

A colleague of hers had mentioned something about yoga in the break room where she was reading her obscure book. The colleague, a woman whose cheeks were a constant burnished red, had managed to transform her pear-shaped body into something approaching a rail road tie with the help of yoga. The machine’s low growling had been replaced by a purr. She presumed that the changes occurred due to some oscillations in the cooling needs. Initially, she wasn’t interested in listening to the conversation. Other people’s conversation’s in the break room being tacitly thought of as indiscriminate by at least 65 percent of the staff, herself included. The woman, Joan, had been wearing a pair of mid-level dress shoes that add an extra inch or so to her already thinning frame. Joan had been extolling the benefits of Bikram to the senior manager of library, who to his credit, had gamely listened with all the signs of attentive posture and relevant head nods, as he waited for his food to finish being appropriately warmed. The conversation seemed wooden and one-sided. Though, at some point Rebecca had become interested and placed her book down, creasing the spine in the process in a way that would have normally bothered her immensely. The senior manager’s shoulders had been rolled forward, his weight shifting subtly from one leg to another. The movement gave him the appearance of being simultaneously childish and yet full of healthy adult energy that some people value highly in senior management. The rumbling of the vending machine had occluded a bit of what Joan had relayed at this point. His glasses had been small and nearly weightless. His impatience, which I’m really only inferring here, had been displayed by an almost imperceptible inclination of his head, which allowed him to stare at a point just above Joan’s head while appearing to listen intently. This particular habit caused most of the employees to assume that he was at least mildly cross-eyed. The topic of which, his eyes, had gone tacitly unmentioned in the office, though each person had probably mulled it over a time or two in the heart of his or her very own cube.

The thing with the hot air balloon is not your simple run of the mill jump off. After she put down the book, creasing its spine, Rebecca pretended to be mulling something over while sucking on the edge of her plastic fork. She had in fact covertly been admiring her forty-seven year old colleague’s impressive butt, which had been outlined fairly well by a pair of tight fitting Calvin Klein dress pants that she had clearly picked up in celebration of her weight loss. Which, good for her, was the sort of agreed upon position of the office in general, though some people were jealous for fairly easy to guess reasons.

For the latter portion of the conversation, Rebecca had kneaded the middle and index fingers of both hands into her temples, feigning a headache. And found, that in closing her eyes she had been able to listen more intently.

“I wake up every morning feeling younger than the day before,” her colleague said. The microwave’s beep had been especially long and piercing, the sort of thing that would have driven a dog nuts. Her boss had beat a hasty retreat from the room, collected his coffee and a hard plastic bowl of sticky rice, and stepped past Joan with an apology that went something like, “No rest for the weary,” which he had said ironically, though no one, not even him, was sure whether the irony was intended or not. And in listening she had had this sort of mental click, like a key finally turning in an old dead bolt, with the same accompanying satisfaction, that she really needed to change something in her life and that perhaps this was it. The coffee had been black and harvested in Argentina.