Men, I let you down again

It’s hot. I need to wear shorts out tonight. I need to leave the house in mere minutes.

So, I must confess, I did use the Butcher’s electric shaver on my legs.

Breathe through it, boys.

I promise I’ll try not to do it again.

America, Give Me Your Money!

America, give me your money and I will flush it down the toilet along with my own. Really, you’ve never met a girl so gifted at just handing her money to corporate America for no reason other than her own stupidity.

USBank (motto: Us bank, you customer): $120 in overdraft charges, due, in part, to my own inability to read my own fucking handwriting. You’re welcome.

Citibank (motto: Hook ’em when they’re broke in college and keep ’em paying that shit off forever): $200 in interest a month, roughly.

Other credit card (motto: We’re here for you when your employer tells you after you’ve moved to take the job that the pay is actually $5,000 a year less than you were told.): $200 in interest a month, roughly.

The credit union (motto: Even poor people need easy access to crippling debt!): Whatever the fuck the car payment is, plus the loan I had to take out to cover moving into this place.

The Government: $270 a month in student loans.

America, let me tell you what’s going to happen. I’m going to win the lottery. Not the whole shebang, but enough to pay off Citibank. I’m going to be so nervous about putting that check in the mail that I’m going to want to drive to a Citibank office and hand them the check in person.

On my way there, I will wreck my car, giving myself selective amnesia, so that I can remember nothing I learned after high school graduation, and thus, I’ll be unable to work, and the only thing I’ll have to show for my life is that I finally paid off one credit card.

Is the Tiny Cat Emily Dickinson?

She hasn’t left my room in days, preferring to spend the hot afternoons curled up on my suitcase near the air conditioning vents and the nights sitting on the window ledge staring out onto the parked cars in the driveway.

Like any cat, I suspect, the wide world of the back yard and the tiny world of my room are both equally interesting. Cats, with their openness to quiet and their appreciation of nuance, give me a lot to think about.

Watching the cat watching me last night, I got to thinking about the numerous things I appreciate about her. Out of everyone in our house, she’s the bravest. When the hermit crab came tumbling out of my pajamas and I shrieked and shrieked because I thought it was a mutant mouse, and the dog and the orange cat ran downstairs to hide under the endtable together, she burst into the bathroom, even though a shower had just taken place in there, and immediately began swatting the crab away from me.

Of everyone in the house, she is the quietest–except when she cries out before coughing up a hairball–which allows her to move through the house mostly unnoticed.

And, of everyone in the house, she most knows how to comfort you when you’re feeling down. The Butcher leaves, as does the orange cat. The dog acts as if your sadness is a personal insult to her. But the tiny cat will come and lay down near you just to let you know you are not alone.

Is she writing poetry, though? That I cannot tell.

Important Things I Learned Today

1. There seems to be one lone concrete pillar not connected to any piece of road over near the new Briley Parkway exit onto I40.

2. My parents both need constant reassurance that I am not a lesbian. They worry because I seem to be alone and they worry that I have found someone and am not telling them.

3. However, even though I am secretly marvelous enough to have a lesbian lover and important enough to her that she would put up with being forced to disappear whenever my parents came to town, I am too fat and ugly to ever get a man.

(As you might imagine, it does a number on a girl to try to follow the logical acrobats necessary to make sense of this, to try to figure out how that all fits together. Is it worth the effort to become beautiful so that I can take scores of male lovers they won’t approve of or should I figure out how to act on impulses I don’t have so that I can remain myself and take scores of female lovers they won’t approve of?)

4. Other girls they know, just like me–fat, alone, etc.–are really fucked up and so I might be as well.

Ah, y’all, it should make me mad, usually, this shit makes me mad, but I’m just tired.

Perhaps these are the callouses Short & Fat speaks of, the parts of your heart that get thick in response to constant bruising.

Ha, I only wish I had more unique issues.

Good night, all.