April 2010
22 posts
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Twenty-four hours from now I’ll be on an eighteen-hour flight to Singapore where I will arrive on Friday at 5am. I’ll have time to shower and maybe take a walk down the street or iron my shirts before I go into work mode for a day and a half until I leave Singapore on Saturday at 11pm and arrive home on Sunday at 12pm, having lived through many more hours than the clocks will tell me I...
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Classifieds
Originally posted on July 23, 2004 at Popscratch.
Scanning the classifieds, we find advertisement after ad after advert for the places we’ve lived, the buildings we’ve seen in unflattering daylight and nightlight, the furniture we’ve lived and loved upon. We’ve explored the business opportunities, we’ve traded for tiny returns the antiques and collectibles,...
I experienced a gush of simultaneous relief and anxiety upon news of the cancellation of a meeting in Rome planned for later this week in which I was to play a small part in presenting to a room full of people full of questions from all over Europe. I was going to leave on Wednesday and return on Sunday, but instead to take advantage of the free time I will have my sisters over for lasagna and buy...
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“My door is grave in oaken strength,
The cool of linen calms my bed,
And there...”
– from “Story of Mrs. W——” by Dorothy Parker
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For the first block of our two-block walk home from a concert last night we had to wade through a mass of pre-adolescents either accompanied or waiting to get picked up by their parental figures. It was entirely different from my previous experience of concerts, with the waiting for ages to get out and the long deaf trip home, to be able to simply leave the arena and walk home. Of course I...
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Trashcan
Sometimes I forget that I wrote stories in my past internet life. Here is a story I originally posted back on June 1, 2004 in an incarnation of Popscratch which I called Fallace.
When she leans over the trashcan, she feels her pores begin to open, starting on her nose and moving back to her cheeks, forehead, chin. Her hair is thin and white and silvery in the dim afternoon light and floats...
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My ultimate frisbee team had its first practice this afternoon — my first time playing since last summer. The season doesn’t start until May but since the weather is good we decided to get together. Well, the weather being good was somewhat debatable. Personally, I could have done without the wind. It howled ferociously, sent my disc in all the wrong directions, messed up my hair, and...
This apple vanilla pear juice sounded delicious and refreshing when I bought it at the store, but ugh it tastes like a scented candle.
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Things got a little heated yesterday in the last class of my postcolonial cultures course. Someone had the misfortune of making the complaint that as a white person she felt like she wasn’t very well represented in the texts we read in the course. I’m pretty sure everyone’s jaw hit the ground, and the collective unspoken response seemed to be concern that she wasn’t in the...
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I sent an email of inquiry to a company who provides a service in which I am interested. In the course of discussion with a colleague about the company, I learned that she is actually good friends with the person who runs the company, and in the course of hearing his full name and having him placed in this context as a friend of my colleague, I realized that I had met this person in my colleague’s...
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It's the little things
sarahb:
Today I suddenly needed to own the classic sixth grade Bonne Bell Lip Smackers trio of Coca-Cola, Cherry Coke, and Barq’s Root Beer (NOT DR PEPPER), only to learn they don’t sell Lip Smackers in the UK. I think this is what my dad meant about marriage being a compromise.
Root beer–flavoured Lip Smackers! They were my absolute favourite in grade school — I would apply it for the...
“Friendship, popularly represented as something simple and straightforward...”
– Anthony Powell, The Soldier’s Art
Someone came around bearing handfuls of dollar-store chocolate Easter eggs and dropped some on my desk. The onset of adulthood was for me accompanied by a new reaction (additional to that of pleasure) to cheap chocolate melting in my mouth: a dry burning sensation in the back of my throat which I have now experienced frequently enough that I avoid most non-fancy brands of chocolate. In spite of...
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