TheBanyanTree: piddly details of my day

[Julie Anna Teague]

Which is going rather strangely.  I woke up very puffy, looking like
someone had punched me in the eyes while I slept.  Like a pink toad.  I
have no idea why. I look somewhat normal now, but am having an extremely
bad hair day, far worse than usual, and along with the pink puffiness and
the scratchy tag in my tshirt, it is making me grumpy. The full moon has
been at me, as well.  

Due to odd circumstances and forgetfullness on my part, I had a tuna salad
sandwich for breakfast, which was both non-vegetarian and non-breakfasty
and should've been skipped altogether.  For mid-morning snack, I chewed
all ten fingernails off, one by one.  Zip zip zip zip zip zip zip zip zip
zip.  Down to the quick.  And then I polished off some cold poptarts for
lunch.  The package assures me that they contain "10 essential vitamins
and minerals" but other than that, they have very little to redeem
themselves.  Bad choices all around.  

Sometime over the course of the last few days, I decided I'm going to buy
a guitar and take lessons.  When I told the boyfriend, he made fun of me,
singing Kumbaya very off key.  Since we'd been getting along better the
past couple of weeks, after I gave him my "start being a decent human
being or I'm out of here" speech, I was caught off guard by his teasing
and started to wonder if we are, again, backsliding, or if I'm just being
hyper-sensitive.  Maybe it had to do with the swelling and the scratchy
tag.  Maybe it will never happen, but I am already picturing myself around
a campfire with friends and family, singing Aimee Mann's "The Moth" or
Neil Young's "Love is a Rose":

   I wanna see what's never been seen		
   I wanna live that age-old dream
   Come on baby let's go together
   Let's take the best right now...
		
Everything seems possible sometimes.  The boyfriend quickly weighed the
cost of a guitar and lessons against my potential success with it, and
advised me to save my money. I do not cotton to naysayers and so I left
the coffee shop and took my little dream with me.

I forgot to mention that the guitar would be in place of the Italian red
leather chair I found.  The one I wanted with every fiber of my being. 
The one I did not allow myself to buy because it felt completely
materialistic and unnecessary, however beautiful, and if I really wanted
to spend money, I should spend it on something more life-affirming.  Like
guitar lessons.  I came to this realization, that guitar lessons were
inherently more valuable than Italian red leather chairs, while in the
movie theater watching Steve Zissou's A Life Aquatic.  Somehow these
things are all related in the world inside my head. 

And thus I stumble through another day, dealing with work and kids and
squeezing the hours till they cough up every last drop of minutes, while
my head and my heart whir away on their own tangents.

Julie
jateague at indiana.edu