Friday, April 19, 2013

Some stream-of-conciousness for your Friday afternoon.

My new roommate says goodbye on his way out the door. It may or may not be worth mentioning that he is wearing stilts made to look like goat legs, horns, a wolf-pelt cape, and carrying a set of bagpipes. With the stilts on he is seven-and-a-half feet tall. Watching people react as he walks across the road and wait for the bus is always fun.  The other night we watched "Django" together in the living room. This is worth mentioning because until I launched a full-on cleaning assault on the living room, it was only barely a room, and didn't fit the definition of "livable".

One roommate is still in the hospital; the new one moves in and now the living room is clean and sports a workstation where the new guy builds MIDI bagpipes, outrageous costumes, flame-shooting metal flowers to mount on his bagpipe drones. If this was a story, you'd accuse me of inventing a household that was too quirky to be believable: the stilt-walking piper, the eternally perky actress, the depressive who lives in his own garbage. And me. Oh, and the mice.

Yeah, the mice. I was watching "Community" in the sitting room the other night when a shadow scuttled by the chair opposite me. No part of me wanted to investigate further. I closed my laptop, turned off the lights and retreated to my bedroom. My mattress lies right on the floor; you can guess how well I slept that night. Hence the cleaning assault. Also the shameful part of me that wishes that the dirty roommate stays in hospital longer. Because when he gets out we have to have A Talk. And I hate confrontation.

"Do you want to go and have a drink?"
The words out of my mouth before I can check myself, made bold by wine and a relaxing evening playing music with friends. He agrees, and we walk towards my place, end up at a hotel bar where we talk and drink until closing times kicks us out a few hours later.
Waiting for the bus in the rain I say hesitantly "I'm glad we can hang out together like this. I know I can never undo what I did to you but I'm so glad we can be friends." He agrees. We begin to talk, for the first time, about how it was to leave each other, how it was good and bad and pain and freedom all mixed together for both of us, how the years have been since it happened. We wave one late-night bus by, then another. Finally we decide to get in out of the rain and continue talking at my place until almost three in the morning. Some serious stuff but a lot of just catching up, too. Two friends, filling each other in on their jobs and their hopes and their lives.

Today I went downtown to the stadium to pick up my running kit for the Sun Run. I signed up before I heard the news from Boston, but it did make me extra-glad to be running this year. I've been working out weekly but not running, so it could be an epic fail on my part, but I shelled out sixty bucks on a sports bra that will keep the girls locked in place and get rid of the dreaded Uniboob, so I'm psyched. If I can still walk afterwards, I'll find my brother and sister-in-law somewhere in the throngs of runners and we'll celebrate by going somewhere where we can pack on all the calories we just burned.

This is Limbo right now: I still have exams but my head's not at school anymore. I have to leave town soon but it hasn't really hit me yet. I have nothing much happening in town before I leave and yet the future is cloudy...

Oh, I got headshots the other day. With all the back-and-forth on the Dove Real Beauty Sketches it was cool to see what the camera made of me. Of course, I see all the usual flaws, but overall I liked what I saw. And I'm eternally grateful to my friend Taylor, who took these shots for free.
I don't know if this is what beauty looks like, but it's what I look like. 

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