Standing up

My home break, Kalama’s, can sometimes get moderately big waves, and these past few weeks it’s been getting exactly that. My days are punctuated by spontaneous runs down to the beach, usually at some bizarre time like 5:30 am or 11:50 pm. The waves are soft and hard at the same time, and I throw my body into them like one throws themselves off a building.  The impact is strong, but satisfying.

With the summer months being hot and sticky, the distance to the beach has gotten shorter. Most times it feels like the only logical place to go as I walk around the house or the city sponged in sweat. Sometimes I bring my boogie board, but usually I just run down in my swim suit and nothing else. Sometimes, even less than a swimsuit. The impulse to cartwheel into the water is at times too strong, so I just swim fully clothed.

Once when I was 10 my uncle took me to a place called Pyramid Rock to surf. The beach was off the Kaneohe Marine Core Base; we drove through guards and past boxy grey barracks. Pyramid Rock was a beach for short boarders and what my uncle liked to call, “spongers,” which meant boogie boarders. The waves were large and the current was strong. The water was deep blue, an indication of the depth. All along the beach people’s bags, fins and boards lined the sand–no one was tanning.

I put my fins on that I’d purchased at Goodwill. They were practically new; they was a high quality brand and fit perfectly. Boogie boards in hand we walked together and swam out through the shore break. As he caught the large waves, about 6-7 foot faces, I floated over them as best I could. But then there was this wave. It didn’t look as big as the others, and no one else seemed to want to catch it. I kicked my fins and pushed the nose down hard and wiggled myself onto the wave.

The boogie board slipped down the slope with such speed and mobility that I temporarily lost my head. I couldn’t think about anything else. The acceleration from my kicking to the speed of a six foot wave behind me. Needless to say, I kept moving forward instead of turning with the wave and I crashed into the white water. I felt like I was going to drown, the wave was pulling me down so hard. I panicked, lost my air, and gasped like a fish with snot running down my face when I surfaced. Immediately, another wave came and my head dunked down again. When I surfaced the second time, I vaguely heard my uncle yelling something to me.

“Stand up!” he was screaming.

I stood up, and to my surprise the water barely came up to my hip bones. I walked calmly to shore with my board in tow and collapsed onto the sand, panting.

Graduation

I was drinking iced water the other day, looking at the chunks of frozen liquid bouncing off the sides, and I remembered France. There isn’t iced water, only water without ice. The cultural weirdness of this got me spinning and thinking about graduation. Right of passage? Dancing naked around flames?

I was eating dinner with my dad the other day and we were eating french fries. Our faces were greasy and we stared at each other not really needing to say anything. Then I asked, “What was your graduation like?” and he said, “It was big, there were over a thousand people in my class. It was hot.” Then he called his classmate and best friend who he’s known for over fifty years, since they were four. “What was graduation like?” he asked. And then he passed the phone to me and the friend said, “I don’t really remember our graduation. It was hot.” Will I remember my graduation? Is it something important or all vile ceremonies?

Sometimes in senior sing I sit on the bleachers and smell the sweat from everyone around me and wonder: what will I remember? Do these moments of stifling hot gymnasium fumes and Tsuda’s voice and hilarious clichés make up something bigger and more substantial?

In the bridge the other day Anna said that she’ll miss the little interactions with people during the school day. Everyone agreed and said that most people in the class are not close friends but just people that they see everyday and occasionally converse with. I nodded my head and seemed to agree but when I actually thought about it, I won’t miss those people. It seems harsh but it isn’t, really. Everything naturally comes to an end and we all die with wishes clasped in our hands. Maybe it is better to accept the natural end of relationships and places and experiences.

I am very close at every moment to agonizing over the people that I laugh with during European History, or the person I sit next to in Senior Sing or assembly ever cycle, or maybe that one person I thought I’d be able to befriend if I had the chance. Or over the salad bar that I’ll never eat from again or the water fountain, oh dear water fountain, that was so cold and so refreshing. I’m very close to agonizing and pining away with my video camera watching the sparkling flow of the water cascade in the sunlight.

I don’t, though. I’m finely balanced on the edge of agonizing and not giving a fuck. I say goodbye to those people, whether in my head or out loud, and I may take a picture or two but mostly I just smell the sweat in Senior Sing, and the dust in the Bridge, and the fresh grass in the quad. I watch the sun through the slits in the gym windows, and the leaves fall onto the walkway, and the freshman dart nervously into their exam rooms this last week of high school (ever).

It all seems right. It didn’t happen to soon, or too late. I approve of the timeline, and mostly I laugh til I cry everytime I think about the beauty of it all.

Of Honor and Ice Cream Men

He’d had one job, in high school, though if he were honest he’d admit that it was his dream. He was an ice cream man. He never really understood how he got the job, but he scooped and drove and rang the bell like no other. On the job, he proudly wore a vintage suit he’d found at Goodwill for five dollars. He felt as though this is a how an ice cream man should be—well dressed, kind, benevolent, and jolly. The kids used to come running down the block to line up for him and he’d play games with them in the baking summer months as the melted cream ran down their sticky faces. He remembered all their birthdays.

Once, he had come down his usual corner and no kids were running toward him.

“Stevie! John! Xander!” he had yelled his favorite’s names and rung his bell.

Xander and Stevie walked out from behind one of the houses and invited him back. It turned out that Stevie’s family from China–her entire family–were visiting and there was a huge party in their backyard.
He’d gone back, eaten way too many crab legs, and just listened to the fast paced Chinese being spoken around him. Of course he couldn’t understand a word, but somehow the jokes were still funny and the stories still sad, and he’d sat there just absorbing the energy and the sounds.

Then he started getting too popular, and kids from the surrounding neighborhoods would come to his route. They told him stories of the other ice cream men, who were cruel and sharp tongued and had once, Billy told him with real tears in his eyes, ran over his cat and laughed. He didn’t believe this, because he believed in ice cream man honor, and he knew that young children sometimes made up stories and forgot that they weren’t real.

However, his views on his fellow ice cream men began changing one morning when he came to the ice cream truck warehouse to unplug his car and get started. Someone had unplugged his electric cord, the one that kept the ice cream cold and hard.

“What the fuck!” he’d yelled.

“Hah, looks like da guys are playing tricks on ya. Did y’do anything to piss ‘em off?” the manager inquired.

He’d brushed it off as a one-time episode but that entire day he couldn’t help noticing the vicious glares from the other ice cream men as they passed each other on the intersections. Images of Billy’s dead cat flashed in his mind.

The next morning as he was pulling out of the warehouse he felt a firm tug on his truck. Upon inspection, he’d found that the electric chord was tied around his tailgate.

“That coulda killed ya!” the manager had exclaimed from the dark shadows. “If that snapped you woulda been fried! The entire trucks metal. Death trap.”

He’d lived his life upon the virtue of ice cream man honor. He’d had faith in the ice cream man honor. But an ice cream man had nearly killed him.

He was almost murdered by an ice cream man.

So he left and never came back.

Scholarship essay

I won a thousand dollars thanks to this essay!

***

My life has been filled with defining moments—moments that have guided my future in deep, lasting ways. The first, most lasting moment was ten years ago, at the beginning of my life and education.

It was a still late August afternoon. The sun directed its heat with focus onto the backseat car windows, and I sat in its warmth looking up through the glass. I was five years old, and being driven home by my grandma. In school that day, our teacher had introduced beginner-reading books and it’s why I couldn’t really see the towering green mountains or the perfect blue sky or the view of the stretching blanket of ocean; I was fascinated by the shapes and meanings of the black words on paper. But however much I loved the words, I still stuttered through the books, unable to understand the entire meaning of the sentences in one continuous glance. This was what occupied my mind that unforgettable sun glazed drive home, and it’s why each sign we passed, I squinted up at it trying to force my mind to bend around the words. Staring, staring, until in one life changing world shattering moment, it clicked. I could read.

The collective shift in my perspective that afternoon greatly affected my life. The beat up second hand Steinbeck novels my dad read to me in fifth grade, the copy of Midsummer Night’s Dream I bought and read on my trip to England at twelve, the complete serenity that comes from burying my head in an old book; the invaluable lessons and stories that I adopted as my own. These have all rooted from that exact moment twelve years ago.

In the short seventeen years I’ve lived, there has been no influence as great to me as the written word. Even on my worst days, it’s hard not to feel sublimely peaceful knowing that I always have access to them.

What I’ve come to realize over the course of high school years is that my kindergarten teacher’s unfailing encouragement brought me to that first defining moment, a moment that changed my future completely. Now, in high school, my teachers have become my most cherished mentors and friends. Their words have gotten me through both Shakespeare and the first fight with my best friend. As I grew up into the woman I am now, my second family has watched me take my first steps into adulthood. Always patient, always challenging me, I owe my passionate love of learning to them.

When I look back on these moments and people who have affected my life, I see a clear path shining in the hazy future. I want to learn, but more importantly, I want to teach students how to learn, and how to love learning. My goal, in a word, is to teach.

The path to this goal is flexible, as most paths and plans are in life. However, I want to attend the best graduate school available and learn about education, and how better to teach students the love of learning. I hope to involve my interests in technology, where I believe education is quickly integrating with, and to teach kids who are full of hope but not opportunity, and I want to give them a world of opportunities through education.

Journal

“Once, a very long time ago, I found a journal on the bus. It was sitting on the very last row by the window, and I didn’t notice it until I had sat down and situated myself. The cover shiny and unblemished, but it looked used and possibly loved. Most of the pages were written on, they flipped easily and I noticed sketches and neat, box-like handwriting. The very back of the last page had the words, “Tell me how it finishes,” written in all capitals on it.

As the bus let people off at the last stop before it entered the Pali, people streamed out the doors and I settled down in my seat. Alone, just me and the bus driver, the journal vibrated as it perched on my lap. It seemed to be emitting a warm electrical current.

Regarding the journal, I mostly wondered about the author…why they left it on the bus, where they were headed, what they were thinking. I was eager to start reading their inner most thoughts and emotions. But at the same time, in the back of my mind I was sure that I’d be zapped by some all powerful journal God if I violated its sacred secrecy. I remember actually chuckling aloud at that thought.

I opened it anyway, just as the bus shuddered around the Pali hair pin turn. I slowly lifted the hard bound cover.

Before I could realize what happened, the pages started fluttering wildly and a hot wind blew fiercely into my face. As the tempestuous wind gained strength, the bus was bursting at its seams, and the doors were flapping loudly. I held tightly to the journal with one hand, and with the other I grasp at one of the metal stability bars.

“Ahh!” said the driver.

“Ahh!” I said.

The driver soon lost control of the bus and hurtled over the Pali ledge. My body flew up with the momentum and slowly my eyeballs worked their way through my soft grey brain tissue until my cerebral cortex was completely penetrated. Due to gravity and the force of the fall, my own eyes were as effective as bullets at destroying my brain. However, my heart was still beating. That is, until the bus crashed and a particularly pointy pine rammed itself through the center of my body. Then I was completely dead.”

The shimmering light finished its tale matter-of-factly and seemed to regard me with indignation.

“That, young girl,” said the ghostly spectre, “is my tale. HEED IT OR PERISH.”

**

“Ahh!” I said outloud and realized with a start that I had been having a nightmare. There was a long drool mark against the window of the bus, and that journal I’d found at the bus stop was still balanced on my lap.

Looking up through the window, I realized that we were just about to hit the hair pin turn. Creepy, I thought, I’d just been dreaming about that.

I picked up the journal in my hands, and with a slight flip of my stomach, I opened the black, hard bound cover page.

Mantinades

“A Cretan does not say in plain words what he feels,
With mantinades he weeps or with laughter he peals!”

From couplets sent by SMS from Yorgos Vittoros, Mayor of Kparissi

Whose  garden are you blossom to, to whom do you belong?

Whose velvet down, whose feather are you, whose rejoicing song?

By Manolis Pasparakis (blind rhymester)

My heart, it doesn’t fool me, even with the games it plays:

All my nights are dark, but that’s the same with all my days.

From Yannis Pavlakis’s Cretan folk poetry collection

Take a look around you when the trees are all in bloom,

And wonder why you’ve chosen that old desiccated broom.

*

The everything of the world is zero, the life of the world is naught;

It is from nothing to nothing that eternity is wrought.

*

When they open wide the church doors to bear his body hither,

I’ll drag forth such a savage cry the wild greens will whither.

*

I want my darling filthy—it’s the dirty girl I trust—

To keep her to myself and make the rest flee in disgust.

From the bard of Sitia, Crete, Yanni Dermitzaki

Lower your branches, little one. This favor’s all I seek,

Because when lightning strikes, my, dear, it always finds the peak.

(Translated from Greek)

Upon reading these poems after seeing He’s Just Not That Into You at the dollar theater at Restaurant Row

I have a band with my fellow classmate, Emily. We write songs about Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Hamlet, and other works of genius. We write rhyming songs, usually in the couplet style, and we pride ourselves on cleverness and wit. Witty titties—that is what we are. We twitter and text each other our rhymes and compose songs based on these rhyming triggers.

So, sitting at the bus stop (my location 80% of the time), I read these and read these again and then read these one more time because they accomplish in two lines what I often cannot. I was in awe of their skill and cleverness and skill. The couplets deal with large, universal matters—big stuff, so to speak. It’s ironic that these poems, two lines long and about fourteen to fifteen syllables at most, manage to accomplish the task of tearing the universe apart and then building it together again.

Obsessed with these poems as I was, I looked them up online to find more information.

I found some technical stuff about the couplets, called mantinades. The mantinades are in fifteen-syllable lines, an iambic “fifteener.” Fifteener is the meter that the Erotokritos, a founding document of demotic poetry for modern poets, uses. It’s also the rhythm that drives Greek rap music (fifteeners on speed) as well as protest slogans (fifteeners on steroids). The translators mention that they often took liberties with the fifteen syllables, partially because they wanted to recreate the wit and wordplay of the poems and partially because English tends to prefer ending in “da-Dum” not “da-Dum-da.”

Much in the way that Americans have “rap offs,” Greek rhymadoros have couplet-offs. Particularly skilled rhymadoros even perform at weddings, baptisms, funerals, and inaugurations. Poetry slams are called mantinadomachos. Like Emily and I, often times teens text message couplets to each other. It’s as much a part of their modern culture as facebook statuses are to us. I love that.

A typical example of a rhyming coupleteer is Andreas Papyrakis, in his sixties, black waxed mustache, black riding boots, illiterate but with a deep knowledge of musical traditions, a lyre player and always of good cheer. He says good couplets come to him only when there is a strong “opposition” in the house. If he bumps into another coupleteer or speaks to one on the telephone, there is a rapid exchange of rhyming volleys before they get to their first hello.

Often the rhymadore repeats the first line to build suspense and then releases the second like an axe, earning applause if it is truly complex or surprising: implying the whole from the detail, breaking up and rejoining the universe in two lines. For the rhymester, the couplet is an obsession, a livelihood, a talent, a war, a proof of life.

Here’s my attempt:

By Lindsea Kemp-Wilbur, modern rhymester

I spoke aloud what I thought, in the future, should happen to me.

But then I was eaten by a giant monster from the sea.

*

Jealousy creates a dark hole that no one can ever fill,

No matter how hard you browse their Facebook, and with passion will.

*

Between us lies mountains, oceans, border guards, and streams.

But we still speak secrets with letters, Skype, smoke signals, and dreams.

Walking empty streets

The voices in the street were loud, as if the dark houses and smooth pavement served as some sort of echo chamber. Laughter. It was brief but jarring as a car door slammed and they walked down to the beach access. There were other noises, whispered voices and forgetting-to-whisper voices…nothing clear or with any kind of message. I closed my eyes and pressed my head against the pillow.

One in the morning, I lay in bed after hearing a car park in front of my house. I heard the laughter and the voices and the slam and the footsteps. Then darkness collapsed on itself once again and streetlights lit up swaying palm trees for no one. It was silent.

I recognized the voices easily. Not that I knew the specific owners of the voices, but it was more that I knew the answers to the questions that the voices posed.

I knew because there have been moments when my voice was released and the sound waves bounced and danced against still houses. The car doors had slammed and we walked down the empty street laughing at nothing. The wind blew softly and I remember noticing the plumeria tree was filled with more flowers than usual. The sky was clear.

It’s a heady feeling knowing the rest of the world is asleep. On the way to my apartment, we used to stroll through the intersection to watch the light turn red, green, yellow, then red again. Once the hush fell and the monkeys in the zoo sent their last cries throughout the park, the ocean was loud enough to hear.

And then there’s the final stumble and giggle when the final destination is reached. Home, with sandy feet or smoke and sweat drenched body, I used to listen to the memory-dense space in the whisper hours, limbs spread out on a sheet-covered air mattress.

The distorted street voices I understand clearly. Each outburst of night laughter I know the source. Those people, the only ones awake in the entire world, I recognize. I can pretend to be asleep and not make a noise or turn a light on, if only they promise to do the same for me.

6 moments in the life of a bus passenger

1.
The number four bus, the bus I take, smells like the armpit of a seventy year old fry cook. It’s by far the sketchiest bus that I’ve ever taken, filled with twitching people, homeless people, old people, costumed people, and me. Sometimes I wonder where I fall into place in the great universal measure of sketch.
2.
“Hate is a lack of imagination.” –Graham Greene

On the bus I once sat next to a mentally disabled boy. Throughout the ride, he would alternate between relaxing his entire body on me and leaning his head on my shoulder. I felt a bit violated. Anger and resentment filled my stomach hot as I subtly tried to nudge him away.

I don’t like being touched on the bus by strangers even more than I don’t like being talked to on the bus by strangers. So, sitting there on my two by two foot brown square seat, I hunched and fumed.

“Hey, hey. No snuggling with strangers,” his mom chided. The mentally disabled boy shifted his weight for a second and then dropped back down.

But this time it was different. His mom’s word choice—“snuggling”—pricked my imagination. I noticed his bare, gangly arms huddled against my shoulder and I imaged how cold he must be on the air-conditioned bus. I imagined his day and what he ate for breakfast (a banana and raisin bran).

When his mom pulled the “stop requested” cord, he lifted his head from my left shoulder and took her hand. They weaved through the standing crowd. I watched them until the bus turned the corner and they were out of sight.
3.
I scribbled: “Deep down I want to be persuaded just so the actions can be explained, and I can sit here nodding before walking away. Not so deep down, I’m scared of my unanswered questions.”

It’s funny how this poem is a lie, I thought to myself as I looked out the greasy bus window, how it’s easier to regurgitate generic sentiments than tell unflinching factual truth. The dawn was breaking, and the doors slammed loud as the bus stopped and accelerated.

It’s true though, the part about lying. None of the passengers look any different from each other. There are Hawaiian shirts on the businessmen. There are averted eyes, hunched backs, pages turning, thumbs glancing off iPod spin wheels. Fat plastic watches on skinny prepubescent wrists.

It’s not that they wear the same exact clothes necessarily—there are no generic personalities—that would be ridiculous. But it’s the shifting eyes that give it away. The Roxy t-shirt girl checking out the Oneil shirt girl checking out some one else. There’s a sense of fear. I know because I’ve felt it. Everyone wants to fit in sometimes. We want to look the same, move the same, think the same. It’s so innate and strong that it’s downright primal. We are as birds flying in triangles, climbing onto buses and off buses and into the sky.
4.
My favorite part about going over the Pali every morning is that moment just before the tunnel. The bus moves with such momentum that I feel like I might hurtle off the cliff any second. I’ve thought about contingency plan after contingency plan, usually when it rains so hard all I can see is fuzzy grey rain-static. Would I want to be under the seat when it crashes? Or should I float to the ceiling with the fall? Do call my mom in the seconds before death?
5.
A fat girl was on the bus in front of me. She smelled like Longs perfume and her hair was thick, curly, and wet. It resembled a mass of black seaweed clinging to a boulder. Her body took up two seats, her thighs over flowing into the aisle. Two stops after I got on, she pulled the stop requested cord and got off. As the bus powered away in great lumbering turns, I saw her light a cigarette and lower her weight onto the bench.
6.
Crack head Santa sat behind me on the bus today. I was in the first row, window seat; he was second row aisle. With his brown tipped full beard poking through the hole between our seats, he leveled his head with mine and turned to look at me. His jacket, maybe six inches away from my nostrils, smelled like Santa had indulged in some ganja and had maybe spilled a forty on himself.

I wondered if there was a rehab center on the North Pole. I imagined their high squeaky voices saying, “Hello, Santa.” I bet he started drinking after Tim Allen played him in Chris Kringle. That was horrible. He’d probably get drunk every Christmas eve and then do some speed (just to be safe). But he really started hitting the hard stuff once Cinnamon the elf showed him how much cocaine looks like snow. A couple of lines of “snow” and he’d be merry for the rest of the night.

But that couldn’t continue for long. One day, as she was mending his best suit, Mrs. Claus found his stash sewed into the fluffy ball in his hat. She kicked him out that night. Every Christmas eve since she’s been putting on a fake beard and making the rounds.

Things weren’t so good for a homeless, drugged out Santa on the North Pole, so he moved south—to Hawaii. No one recognized his traditional outfit and it was warm, the most logical location on the globe. When Santa couldn’t afford his “snow”, and when crack prices got cheap, he got himself a real pipe and cut off his red velour pant legs. He’s made his home camping out on the stoop of “Paintballtopia” in Maikiki.

I pulled the stop requested cord and took one more look at jolly Santa: eyes rosy and cheeks shiny, he winked in my direction and promptly passed out against the window

Twenty three fifty nine

and the rest is silence.

Acid wash convicts and fake-Gucci homeless

Note: This was originally written Thanksgiving morning and published that day, but I took it down after dinner when I became gripped with the fear that I wasn’t thanking the right people. Now it’s up again because, as I’ve heard so succinctly put, “ainokea.”

Riding on the bus to go get coffee this Monday, a man wearing dirty acid wash jeans and an acid wash jacket on the bus addressed me.

“M’am? M’am? M’am?” he said in rapid succession.

In my experience on the bus, I’ve found the best route for avoiding confrontation is to innocently ignore people. Also in my experience on the bus, I’ve found that whenever I think someone is talking to someone else, they are in fact talking to me.

I was reading the back issues of Ka Wai Ola, deeply engrossed in a short story a friend of mine had gotten published. Why would this man need to talk to me? Obviously he had to say something of deep importance, because feigning deafness wasn’t working. I turned around.

“Hi, yes, sorry to bother your reading…oh my,” he said as I turned around, and then to my look of confusion, he said, “I thought you were much older…maybe 26. Do you go to school here?”

“No, I live in San Francisco.” I lie to people who wear matching dirty acid wash, it’s a matter of principal.

“I noticed you reading a book of poetry–are you a poet?”

“Sort of.”

“Great! Well, I’m a poet.”

“Really?” I said.

“Yes, when I was in jail, I wrote every day! It helped to get me through those times…then later when I was in the hospital, for psychosis not something really bad, they told me to write it would help my anger issues a lot and now I’m going to a poetry reading.” It sounded like he had marbles in his mouth.

On the seat next to him was a trapper keeper. He handed it to me, indicating that these were his poems. The cover of the folder boasted a 104.3 sticker and had three pieces of printer paper on the inside.

I read the first one, which started with this line, “SHANGHAIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII/has those CALICO CATS…” The other poem was about Chinatown and those “overpriced business men who decide the fate of those who don’t wear ties.”

“These are wonderful. I really like the first one. You should definitely keep writing.”

He smiled so large that it outshone the large, glinting metal buttons on his denim jacket. I pulled the “Stop Requested” cord and we got off at the same stop.

“So,” I said in what I hoped was a cheerful, inviting voice, “what did you go to jail for?”

His face fell slightly, and he broodingly said, “Oh, well, I went for domestic abuse…my father…well I don’t like the word father…my dad.”

He then went on to talk indescribably about his father or his step father and how that made him feel, it was all a blur of words. But I kept smiling and nodding and trying to memorize the series of events.

We parted directions and my first act was to call my friend Sam. My second act was to walk into the coffee shop and tell the barista. My third act was to inwardly feel smug that an ex-con had talked to me. My fourth realize how cool it was that he wrote poetry in jail to help his anger problems.

The whole situation reminded me distinctly of the North Beach Jazz Festival, where I met a man named Henry. Henry wore a denim hat with spray paint on it that he proudly informed me he designed and sewed himself. Henry had fake Gucci sunglasses on that took up half of his face. Henry spit when he spoke passionately and stood about four inches below me. Everyone knew Henry, even my friend who ran the Jazz Festival (which is why Henry and I met backstage).

But Henry himself didn’t really know Henry, I found out later that afternoon. I had suspected as much when he told me he was a famous fashion photographer who was running for some sort of low ranking state office. Henry was crazy in the literal sense. But Henry and I somehow got along swimmingly, and we laughed and talked about “the fashion industry” and photography (I showed him my film SLR and he showed me his digital one) and politics and the nature of men and women. Somehow he was just crazy enough to not be crazy, and I was morbidly fascinated by anything crazy enough, probably because I half-expected it to become either a short story or a blog post one day.

Anyway, he gave me his fashion designer card and I took the bus home that afternoon, wondering, upon reflection, why it was that crazy people like me so much. I decided not to worry about the psychological implications, feeling passably comforted by the fact that I have the skill of being aware and keeping myself safe.

So, this November morning I woke up at 4:30 am, and haven’t been able to sleep since. Six hours later, I’m on my second pot of coffee and still in my pajamas, thinking about how to relate these stories back to Thanksgiving. I could take the typical route, pointing out how thankful I am that I have both my sanity and a wardrobe free of dirty acid wash (all of mine are washed and neatly folded). Or how thankful I am that I got out of both situations without being kidnapped and tortured, which is, as we know from Lifetime, what always happens.

I could do that, but it might make me vomit bitterly into my scorn, and I don’t want to do that before eating all that turkey.

I’m thankful for a lot of things, really. My family, my friends, my education, my teachers (who are as good as family), the Internet, music, art…And that list definitely includes convicts writing poetry and crazy fashion designers and living in the world however one sees fit. Because if there was one thing that these two men had in common, it was that they were disarmingly happy and shockingly different. And I’m thankful that that exists, whatever odd, acid washed or fake-Gucci sunglassed form it may come in.