yayy

I'm in the library, and I'm sitting in one of the study tables where a bunch of people can sit, and there is also a paralell table right in front of the one that i am sitting at. that might not make sense, but let me put it this way: think of it as an equals sign...=...and i am sitting facing northward at the lower dash....anyways, sitting at the paralell table is a girl who i am able to identify because she is wearing some sort of jersey that has her last name plastered over the back of it. the reason that this is important is because this is a girl who has face-book-friended me but has yet to actually meet me. for those of you not familiar with facebook, save yourself the trouble and don't familiarize yourself. for those of you who are familiar with it, this person not only facebook friended me but also facebook friended every member of the class of 2009, whose total comes to somewhere around five hundred students. i, in comparsion have about 20 facebook friends. so, in my head, i thought, how funny it would be for me to go up to her and introduce myself as one of her facebook friends, and have an incredibly awkward conversation directly afterwards. I smiled and laughed when her friend, who was sitting next to her at the time, got up and took off her swearshirt, and while doing so looked at me and saw me smiling in their direction, ultimately thinking that i was glad to get a free peep show from somebody. the world works in mysterious ways.

this weekend's assignment for fiction writing was to write in the first person with a character who is not like you (me). it proved to be more difficult than I thought it would be, but i'd like to share it with you. it is yet to be titled.

As soon as I stepped outside I knew that it was way colder than I had thought, so I ran back upstairs to the apartment and grabbed my Trinity sweatshirt off of the kitchen table. I slammed the door behind me and ran downstairs. There wasn’t any time to wait at the stop light, so I timed my crossing between a black Lincoln Navigator, what a sweet car, and some other piece of shit that was riding a few seconds behind it. I skipped down the steps into the subway stop and saw one just pulling away. I forced myself in between the closing doors, pushed them to my sides and ran to get the one remaining seat. I lifted my cell phone out of my pocket; the interview started in fifteen minutes. Some Trinity alum, a friend of my dad’s, who works at a magazine, said he could help me out. My parents decided I need to start making money for myself this summer, which is completely unfair and irritating, since all of my friends will be partying in Nantucket while I’ll be sitting in a goddamn office.
“Is that Trinity in Hartford?”
I looked up. A black guy, must have been forty something, in an ugly sweatshirt and a dirty beanie, was sitting right across from me.
“What?” I said curtly.
“Your sweatshirt. Do you go to Trinity?”
He had a stupid smile on his face, and I saw that a few of his teeth were pointed in random directions, and they were the color of an egg yolk. He wasn’t looking directly at me, yet there was no question that he was talking to me.
“Yeah, I do.”
“My brother worked in the cafeteria there for a while,” he wheezed. “Had an apartment and everything.”
I faked a smile and nodded in acknowledgement. The subway pulled into a stop. Three more stops to go.
“They laid him off about six months ago, though.”
“He might have made the omelet I ate for breakfast once or twice,” I said a little louder.
“They told him he had violated a health code, even though he didn’t think so. He wasn’t too bright, so he probably did. He doesn’t have my brains! Ha ha ha!”
He obviously wasn’t listening to anything I said. The car grinded to another stop. I considered hopping off and walking the rest of the way. I looked around at the other passengers; everyone had their heads down. I wanted this guy off my ass already.
“Now he’s just wandering around looking for a job again. He’s been living with me for a few months now, but doesn’t pay the rent, ever. I keep telling him to look harder but he can’t find anything.”
I nodded again in his general direction.
“Maybe you know of something? One Trinity guy helping out another?” He put extra emphasis on the word ‘Trinity’.
“I don’t think so.” I decided to get out at the next stop and just walk the rest of the way. I stood up and moved to the door.
“Don’t you know of anything? He needs something!”
“I don’t know of anything, no. Maybe he needs an education. Maybe if he had read the health code this wouldn’t be a problem.”
He looked at me with empty eyes. I think I had finally shut him up.
The subway stopped slowly and I got out. I didn’t look back towards him as I got out and walked to the staircase, but I felt his eyes on me all the way up the steps and on to the street. I began walking the few blocks to my interview. If I was a few minutes late, this interviewer would have to deal. It had warmed up considerably since I had been on the subway, but I decided to keep my sweatshirt on anyway.