there is hardly anything better in this life than a
triscuit with a bit of
laughing cow garlic and herb cheese smeared generously all over it.
that said, i think i'll put a few excerpts from the non-fiction essay (is that what you even call it?) i've been working on in here. helpful comments are welcome.
Title: "Re-Stored"
"...Of course, it wasn’t the clothes I was looking to evade, but the people inhabiting them. Those campus drones blindly following each other in and out of Abercrombie (thanks Gram and Gramps!), American Eagle, (thanks Mom and Dad!) and Aeropostale (thanks Reference Desk work study!) were a constant source of discomfort for me. They were tiring. There was something missing. There was no grit. Anyone with a bad attitude had, in my opinion, no right to it; those with fluorescent smiles shimmering at me from across the quad were, at best, incomplete sketches of what a “real” human was.
And so I found myself in my car, zipping along to find the nearest parking space to the entrance, to maximize the time I could spend in the store before my walking date. I shifted my car into park with my right hand, while opening the door with my left. The car was barely off before my sneakers hit the asphalt. I sped across the fire lane and leapt through the automatic double doors.
...K-Mart is a wonderfully anonymous place that accepts all kinds. People who must share my disease walked with furrowed brows among the racks of clothing, searching for the ugliest bolero jacket or most ill-fitting neon tube-top. I floated over to the shoe department and slipped my foot into a four-inch platform foam sandal, plastic jewels glittering under buzzing lights. A woman with two screaming children and probably a headache gave me an approving glance as I hobbled up the aisle in search of a foot mirror, one foot in a sneaker, the other strapped into the new shoe. Because of my disease, these sandals were starting to grow on me, and The Mommy’s approval had fueled my desire. Trying on the other sandal and finding it a bit more snug than the first (damn these un-identical feet of mine!), I decided to look at one more aisle. I waddled around to the other side, my feet still in the foam shoes and attached by a short elastic band.
...I sped to the checkout and a crusty woman, probably a Gladys or a Bernadette, passed the scanner across the tag attached to my shoes. She must have noticed the twinkle in my eye, because she made some snarky comment about the shoes’ attractiveness being inversely related to the size of my grin. I agreed that they weren’t the wisest style choice, but at only three dollars, how could I resist? On this point, the Gladys couldn’t disagree.
“I love this place!” I gushed to her, practically glowing at the thought of parading around campus in my treasures the next day.
I would eventually discover that pink canvas Mary Janes match pretty much nothing, that they look stupid with pants and skirts alike, that they are the subject of occasional ridicule, and that they make the backs of my feet bleed. But for that afternoon, as I skipped out of the store and tossed the plastic bag into the backseat, zooming off to traipse through the woods on a warm May day with a favorite English professor, I felt restored."
