I haven't posted in FOREVER.
Because I'm a slacker.
BUT
I got extra financial aid moneys, which is always, always, always good.
Now I just have to get good grades to keep the money that I claimed to have earned.
Today I shot a gun at work. There was nothing to do, and we all wanted to dress up in Confederate and Union uniforms and shoot Civil War muskets. And we did.
Afterward, I had to go to the guys' bathroom to clean the guns. Because that's where all the cleaning stuff is. And I was in there, and my boss came in, and I thought it'd be really awkward. But then he just started helping me take apart the weapon and "wollyrag" it, which means to make it all shiny with a pre-oiled rag.
Wollyragging. I'm not kidding.
And yes, this is the same boss that ignored my skimpy outfit at Halloween.
I will post writing up from the book soon. I'm just nervous enough to die. In the meantime:
I call this "Place Holder." I submitted it to a student publication. Wish me luck!
This was not a normal hotel room.
Instead of the Book of Mormon or a Gideon Bible, I found an advance copy of Miley Cyrus’s autobiography in the top drawer of the nightstand. Advance copy…so the cover was cardboard-like, and I found three spelling errors on the back jacket alone. Menacing black letters told me I could not sell this.
I flipped my purse upside-down and dumped the contents to search for traces of currency. Some yen, but they were carefully placed as bookmarks. I was not using this to buy anything – they were probably novelties I’d collected and started using to hold my page. I also found a Cuban coin, but there was a vague memory of me digging the thing out of a ditch with a long stick as a freshwater crab jumped and snapped at me. I’d been screaming, “I’m not trying to hurt you, crab, I’m trying to get the shiny thing.” And the bluish-purple monster didn’t listen to me.
No other cash. I had a bank card, just one. Viewpoint Bank. No dollars, no euros, no pesos. My wallet was just a folded piece of leather with an etching of a woman with a basket on her head. I had two passports - one with no stamps inside. It was completely blank, completely new. The picture inside looked like a slightly older version of myself. The other had expired five years ago.
Angry, I snapped on the television. There had to be a dialect, a language, something. One station hummed in Punjabi. Another was a language-less weather channel…but it gave the temperature in degrees centigrade, not Fahrenheit. But all that really told me was that I wasn’t in the United States, since that’s the only country that’s stubborn enough to use Fahrenheit. The last available channel sang in Italian. The rest showed static and more static. There was a cable box, and it confused me, so I promptly threw it out the window along with the advance copy of Miley Cyrus’s autobiography.
Radio? Did I have one of those alarm-clock/radio combinations common in hotel rooms? If I could listen to the radio, I could listen for a language, and then successfully discover the nation in which I was a confused visitor.
No. Instead of an alarm clock, there was an outlet and, on the table, a charger for every cell phone ever invented. Ever. I assumed hotel management wanted me to take the hint and use my phone as an alarm clock. And was there a white, inoffensive phone with a springy cord nearby? No. Of course not. And I love springy cords. I like to bite them, like the twisting thing on my keychain. But I couldn’t even leave bite marks in the hotel phones.
What the fuck.
I looked down out my window at the destroyed cable box and the intact piece of shit book. I found it funny that the technologically primitive book survived. It was alright until a pre-teen came by an actually picked the thing up.
“No! No! That is not for public consumption!” My voice screamed at blonde highlights. “It has errors! Terrible, terrible errors in grammar, spelling, and possibly flow! It is meant to be edited! NO!!!”
She didn’t react to me. She either didn’t understand what I was saying because she didn’t know English, or she didn’t understand what I was saying because her ears decided to ignore me.
I popped my ears by moving my jaw. Once, twice, three times. I tried to make music with it, but I couldn't pop my ears as fast as I wanted the beat to be.
Then I went to sleep. The hotel did still have a bed.
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