coral gables

The professor was desperate for someone to participate, “Just like Dennis mentioned last class…” I give the dumb look of a goat being lectured by a farmer. The stare is practiced. The blank look that means “no.” –the refusal to engage even when the teacher drops your name, “No. I will not humor you. I will not save you. This material bores me. Everyone who read it knows the answer. Try again, or don’t.”

A student who writes great papers, who follows the reading, and deliberately chooses not to participate is more damming (and offensive) to a teacher than a whole class of goats. Maybe this is why getting recommendation letters is going to be so awkward…

Listless. 

Anxiety nights – (JHR) there’s a rat in the room …and something about this stinks of high school.

One,
Two,
Three… heave.

One, two, three, heave, heave, heave and crack – the pickaxe finally lodged into the bedrock. I scooped the rock chunks out of the hole and threw them at some nearby mulch roaches.

Then I popped in a fern and patted it down and heaved at another spot.

Landscaping at the Hope Ranch: Gandhi community service day.

Dorky community service fun, then cleanup (I was a site leader), inappropriate conversations (and sing-alongs), and avocados that were probably poisonous .

Papers and snotrags,

JHR described me as the antithesis of Reinaldo Arenas. I don’t know if I like the comparison. I’m aiming for Trollope actually – beard and all.

Leftover Taco bell & Nancy grace – another mother drowned her kids. It’s going to be an early night because I’m diseased. Have you noticed every time you say you’re ill someone says, “Oh, yes, I heard something is going around.”

Something is always going around in the dorms. As long as it’s not the plague we’ll be okay.

I saw Die Große Stille yesterday. It’s an almost three our long (and mostly silent) documentary on life in a Carthusian monastery. I only felt like a complete voyeur while watching the old monks. The director has repeating sections where three monks stare into the camera for a full minute. Some shift their eyes, some smirk, others glare. The old monks look like Dürer woodcuts. Their eyes tell you you’re trespassing. This was someone else’s idea.

One of the monks was getting a cream treatment. I think that’s a very European thing. Grandfather got that sometimes. His skin had boils, it sagged. His beard was wiry and cracked.

Another monk hobbled everywhere. He was hunched as though excessive prayer had moistened his bones until they became unable to support him. Or maybe it was all that kneeling that gave him that “struck down by god” appearance like the homeless lady who lives near club Mansion on South Beach.

She sleeps at the bus stop between Mansion and Twist. Her chest is higher than her head. She’s become so grotesque that most tourists don’t bother to look at her entirely— Their eyes stop at her edges. She’s something that belongs to the slums of Calcutta, not America, and definitely not South Beach. She must have fucked up royally or led an exceptionally sad life.

It’s sort of interesting that the pious and forsaken both end up stooped… but that’s probably unfair.

The monks’ situation was a religious mix between a penitentiary and boarding school. They live in cells and receive most of their meals through a window. A man with a creaky cart comes by, unlocks the little window facing the hallway, and slides the meal in.

Dinner is in a large hall where no one talks except one monk who reads a selection from what seems to be the Carthusian rulebook as the others eat.

The only conversation happens during the weekly walks in the countryside. And even then it’s about something as banal as hand washing procedures at other monasteries. The concept of living a completely inner, but utterly exposed life seems bizarre. (exposed in the sense that you are, in theory, in the intimate presence of god the entire time.) The monks share a lot in common with the prisoner obsessing about his girl on the outside – or the locked up loon with the imaginary friend. It’s quiet in their cell but there’s the incessant mental chatter of prayer, conversations with god, penance, ritual.

Rand would have had considered the whole deal sick.

Although note that her heroes tend to live internal lives similar to the monk, and the homeless woman.

Horror movies and classes – things have been quite morbid lately. Last Shakespeare class had Lavinia running around newly raped, handless and tongue-less. In American Lit we are reading Dispatches, which is basically a play by play gore report from the Vietnam War.

The class before that we watched a movie on the Kennedy’s assassination tape. It showed his head explode at least a dozen times. Yes, that got old. What was strange every time was Jacki attempting to scoop up the brains from the hood of the trunk.

I almost wrote that today was a bad day. It wasn’t. It wasn’t sunshine and gingersnaps, but it wasn’t horrible.

I don’t think I’ve had a bad day yet and all of this gore is a continual reminder of that.

Zombies tearing through the halls, your husband’s head exploding from an assassin’s bullet, being raped and mutilated Shakespeare (or Hialeah) style,… being forced into a jungle where you’re hunched in a pool of leeches to avoid being capped by some random, looming sniper…

that’s a bad day.

So being tired, cranky, too hot outside and too cold inside (my private school classroom) doesn’t seem to qualify does it?

There’s room for improvement of course, but that’s all up to me (isn’t that nice?). My day probably wasn’t good as Trump’s or King’s. I have time though.

And, I’m well aware that Trump and King are probably working before I even condescend to get out of bed. Again, all things to work on and hopefully achieve before I truly have a bad day.

“I want a copy of all of the papers and get me a manager,” the lady demanded. She looked like an aging prairie wife. She was stout, big chested, and wore her white hair in a big ponytail. The Geeksquad girl slunk into the back room and left me alone with ponytail.

“This is ridiculous,” she said, “ I’ve worked I.T. for over twenty years and they are trying to tell me about computers.” I gave her shy stupid smile that she probably thought was sympathetic.

I avoided ponytail’s ticked-the-hell-off face and tried to imagine the computers she used to work on. Twenty years in I.T.? Really? I imagined her with a blond ponytail wearing the same flannel button down, hulking over a huge clunky monitor somewhere in Dallas. If you wear that much flannel you belong in Dallas.

The Geeksquad girl came back and indicated ponytail to the manager like she was the alligator in the backyard pool. I offered Geeksquad girl my lap top, now dead, and detailed its maintenance history.

Ponytail had taken the bitch-route with her and it hadn’t gone too well so I played the victim: This is the 7th or 8th time I’ve brought this computer in. I don’t understand why it won’t work. I’m a senior at UM and I have my notes on that thing and my grad school applications. Oh my god I’m going to lose my grad school applications… I’m a graphic designer too and need a working computer. That’s how I earn my money. I’m out of the job every time I bring this in. I’m losing my papers and my designs, oh and my keyboard keys keep falling off. It’s like scrabble and I can’t take it. Oh why won’t it just stay fixed? Scrabble isn’t that fun. I don’t have time for this…

I refrained from adding a “woe is me” but it was implicit.

The Geeksquad girl looked up the past work orders for my computer. It had been worked on about eight times this year and had three hard drive replacements. The AC unit on the computer was broken for half of the work orders but they had misdiagnosed it every time.

Ponytail was still hissing at the manager, a tall black man who kept grunting and occasionally saying “I see, I see.”

Geeksquad girl told me that I was eligible for a new computer due to the ‘no lemon’ policy in my warranty. She had to ship it out to Gateway first. She would ask them to junk out my computer and then Gateway would refund Big Box for the computer. That refund would give me store credit towards a new computer.

It would take ‘about’ ten business days. They’d call me.

When I left the Geeksquad counter Ponytail was ranting about dual memory disks, “I know about computers. I’ve been doing this for two decades. Hell, I could have done this myself but,…”

I went to the laptop section to see what I would have to choose from in ‘ten business days.’ My laptop was $1399. I could get something decent for that right? Well, I happened to be right and then some. I walked through the isles about three times with a huge shit-eating grin like the benefactor of some gross accounting error. All of the laptops had at least twice the RAM and diskspace of my deceased Gateway, and they were all about $800 except for the gaudiest Vaio and MacBook.

So, any suggestions?

Mean snickers from the bar & the sticky walk back to Alton. Hey, it’s 21.

Hialeah Gardens, graveyards & oldies.