a cold, damp day, february masquerading as early november, a heavy odor hung in the air.  it's a fragrance i had previously thought to be indigenous to elementary school buses.  gasoline, new textbooks, bubblegum and gym socks.  strangely enough, i caught a whiff of it outside the drugstore, and for a moment it made me feel as though i were far too young to be digging up five dollars for cigarettes, as i was.  a cherry soda and a bag of chocolate peanuts, maybe.  i bought gumdrops. a woman defines "iambic" for her ten-year-old daughter over a plate of scrambled eggs. a girl says "perambulate" in math class. she means "parabola." no, this girl is not me. matthew comments that the squirrel outside the window looks "exceptionally squirrelly." marcus tells me my shoes are "poppin." i take this as a compliment. the man in the apron asks me if "dog" and "god" would be an anagram. i nod, and am about to say something about palindromes when i find my hand jamming a cigarette between my lips instead. good move, i think. the cigarettes. after buying gumdrops at walgreens, i had a cup of coffee. i realized that the gumdrops just weren't cutting it. being too lazy to trudge three blocks back to walgreen's in the rain, i forked over $6.50 for gauloises at some snooty smokeshop with shiny floors and leather sofas. taking into account my current financial state, i should not be spending $6.50 on cigarettes. also, i am reading far too quickly. i suppose i could go to the library instead of buying books all the time, but i just adore the feeling i get when i add a new volume to my bookshelf. when i was little, my mom used to check out paintings from the fond du lac library. take one home and hang it over the fireplace for three weeks, then exchange it for a new one. that's sort of fun to do with paintings. i remember that my favorite was of wine and pomegranates, and that i would always whine when my mom picked out something like limes or wheelbarrows or ducks. my dad matted a painting i did in high school and hung it in the living room, along with some cezanne reproduction and this awful oil thing i did in about twenty five minutes as an exercise for a class last year. the assignment as to set up a still life of white objects and to paint them, using no white at all, but still "capturing the various hues reflected in the light and lurking in the shadows," as dennis had put it, smiling with perfect white teeth and fluttering his hands so that his ruby ring sparkled in the lazy sunlight diffused through the greasy windows of the studio. my mom found the painting in a heineken crate in the garage. "i love the wine bottle on its side in the background." "that's a bar of soap, actually." "well, nobody would ever know." the one my dad hung is truly awful, a grotesque, swirling mess i created on a dented slab of masonite i found leaning against a wall in the parking lot of my high school. i would never, ever paint on masonite now. paint is too expensive, painting too exhausting. but...it's on masonite. (you can't see me, but i'm hanging my head in shame.) this monstrosity was done almost entirely with my fingers, and the paint is thick, piled up like some horrendous topographical map. those were the days during which i could waste paint without a tinge of guilt, as it was supplied by the high school and i figured that, given the staggering cost of tuition, i could (and should) use as much paint as i damn well pleased. my dad hung the painting upside-down. i didn't say anything. pierre instructed the class to write sentences consisting of no fewer than one hundred words each. and no, he's not kidding. i couldn't imagine why anyone would think that he was, but apparently the facial expressions exhibited by several of my peers prompted this statement. "james joyce wrote a forty three page sentence," he added. nobody seemed to care. my sentence was about a person who must take on the awful business of clearing out the estate of a departed relative. there's a pretty swell part about the slow, pained opening of a heavy door, emitting a stifling blast of stale air and reminding someone, rather morbidly, of the creaky old lips of a venerable woman on her deathbed. all in all, it's a horrible sentence. but the image of creaky old lips rather amuses me. so. i've had just about enough of this post, as i'm sure you have. oh crap. i'm going to be late for school. love kirsten Care2 make the world greener! http://www.care2.com - Get your Free e-mail account that helps save Wildlife! +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+ +---+ Brought to you by the Sinister mailing list +---+ To send to the list mail sinister@missprint.org. 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