Montage

It's been about two weeks since my last post, a lapse that was altogether deliberate and purposeful, and whose artistic merit will soon be clear. I have not written for two weeks so that I could then come back and write two stunning weeks of my life in a montage. For you. Really! A montage! That film device where all of the improbable parts of the plot are glossed over and rushed through to the accompaniment of lame, getting-things-done music.

Ready?

Cue the music: something mid- to up-tempo heavily reliant on synthesizers-- think of that song in "Scarface" called "Take it to the Limit" that plays during Tony Montana's building-my-drug-empire montage.

Scenes in quick succession, one fading to the next:

me valiantly blow-drying my hair in an effort to make it look professional

circling the campus where I work in a fruitless search for parking among my students' Hummers and Lexi (plural of Lexus?) and giant tricked-out, ultra shiny pick-ups, I jauntily hold up my hand to block the rays of early morning sun, which light up my now hopelessly retarded hairdo like a brown fan around my head. still the music continues upbeat as I walk the three blocks to work.

at the front of a long classroom, I try to point to my email address scrawled on a white board while simultaneously trying to scratch my face, causing me to lose my balance and nearly fall. This happens a lot, this total lack of spacial orientation while trying to teach. Also, I am pointing with my arm bent at the elbow and clamped to my side because somehow I am sweating profusely in this mild-temperatured classroom and am mortified of being the community college teacher with sweat stains under her arms.

the community college teacher with sweat stains under her arms returns home and throws a frisbee for her dog in the semi-sadistic hope of finally depleting the dog's boundless energy. Useless. In the final nuclear winter that will end all life on earth, Abby will somehow survive and trot from one wasted horizon to the other with her frisbee clamped between her teeth, whining for someone to throw it, god damn it, Throw. It.

roughly halfway through our two-week artistic hiatus, a crippling depression strikes. The cheesy synth music must now fade into some Depeche Mode or, God forbid, Morrissey. For roughly 48 hours I am an intolerable cloud of barely muffled sobs, shuffling from refrigerator to couch staring at nothing and eating nothing. I tell my husband I no longer give a shit where we are stationed next because I can't imagine it getting any better. Then I go sit in my car along the sea wall, watch the waves, and write in my journal about the butch lesbians next to me in their pick-up, shotgunning Bud Light from the huge cans you get at Stop N' Go. Big lesbians with big square working-on-cars shoulders, who tromp over to the sea wall trash barrel to throw out their empties and stretch their backs as the evening breeze ruffles their squarish mullets. Feeling much better, I head home, eat a bag of M&M's and am much restored.

return of upbeat music, more quick shots of me teaching interspersed with shots of me being paid to surf the internet, where my blue-haired lady friend found this brilliant blog.

and then the final scene of the montage is me, fabulously drunk on a Spanish red wine whose name translates to "House of the Devil," devouring basil havarti cheese and poppy seed crackers with my husband while we watch "Casablanca" and recite all the lines.

And that was basically two weeks. See? Wasn't the wait worth it? Yyyyyyeeeaaaahhhhh....

The dude who lives next door with his wife and two-year-old boy is out in their postage stamp backyard (next to our postage stamp backyard-- creepily I can see them out our second floor window) with the kid teaching him to swing at a giant blue foam baseball with a giant red foam bat. The man stands about four paces from the little boy, crouches over with the ball in his hand and asks, "Are you ready?" The kid strikes his stance-- knees bent, ass out, arms nearly covering his face as he waggles the bat directly above his head-- and says, "Yeah" while taking a quick series of tiny hopping steps toward his dad to meet the pitch almost as soon as it leaves his dad's hand. Mostly this ends in the dad getting bopped in the knees with the bat, but as I was writing this I heard the whoop of victory-- the ball made it over the fence to drop softly on my car's hood.

Way to go, dude. At least somebody's making some progress around here.