Oddity

At my mother’s house, on the main wall of her kitchen, is a set of cupboards and cabinets. On top of the cabinets is an artificial potted plant. The plant looks like budding artichokes, dusty and odd-colored. It’s not green, but more gray and brown, and a dusty film covers the ridges of the buds. The pot looks like it is made of clay, a rusty brown color that fades into gray at the top. It’s not much bigger than the size of my head. An owl sits right next to it, just slightly smaller than the plant, eyeing me with a cockeyed expression. His black pupils, almost seem to shake in the round orbs of his eyes, his chest puffs out over the edge of the cabinet and no matter how I move he seems to be watching me, incredulously.

They appear to be a set, but I cannot understand how they relate to one another. It might help if I knew exactly what the plant is, some cactus perhaps, but instead I look at it and I remember that dreaded vegetable, the one that stabs my fingers through the thin produce plastic bags and I try to weigh and ring it up. Small strands of fuzzy plantlike fingers shoot out of the top and curl over, heavy with dust. But it’s the owl you always see first, looking at, eyeing you. An owl, always aware, perhaps most nosy, more predatory, than wise, and he’s feeling in the mood for more than artichokes.

Junkyard Quotes 1-4

I took a bunch of headlines from the Sunday AJC that seemed kinda odd.

1.       1. Coping with death in the workplace

2.       2. Drug court: Saving money, Saving lives.

3.       3. Decorated Veteran of the Teenage Conflict—Courage under Criticism

4.       4. National research shows some kids have higher academic performance when taught by teachers from their own ethnic groups.

Original Prompt

Bernard Cooper's "Burl's"

My parents usually lingered after the meal, nursing cups of coffee while I played with the beads of condensation on my glass of ice water, tasted Tabasco sauce, or twisted pieces of my paper napkin into mangled animals. One evening, annoyed with my restlessness, my father gave me a dime and asked me to buy him a Herald Examiner from the vending machine in front of the restaurant.  

Cooper’s essay begins in a restaurant setting. He uses this setting to subtly flesh his parents’ characters, as well as uses it as the source and occurrence of his main topic--gender identification. It is at Burl’s that he has his first brush with gender confusion, and it is there after that he begins questioning the roles and the binaries that he identifies with. Cooper fuses these gender identities with both his parents stark roles and his wavering one and as a result reveals more about their characters and their roles in relation to one another—their intimacies or the lack thereof than could be revealed through simple telling. The reader also focuses on the narrator’s struggle to fit into expected character. Cooper travels throughout the work, but his return to Burl’s places it as both the opening and closing of his work, contrasting the plastic and phony aspects of the restaurant to the phoniness of reality. Cooper questions what is real and where does gender begin to define? 

However, there is an interesting section in the beginning where Cooper focuses on tightness—holding tightly to the dime or paper, the tightness of the transvestite’s dresses. Cooper struggles to fit the world into two tight binaries, and in doing so, struggles with the open interpretation of the world around him. My challenge is to take a moment where you have felt tight, whether that was feeling like you were trapped in a tight, stressful situation or even wearing a pair of jeans that don’t fit quite right anymore, and then reflect on that tightness and attempt to tie it into some moment of discovery, or openness. 

Improv 1, Week Eh...

I’ve always had a fascination with Applebee’s slogan: Eating Good in the Neighborhood. Partly because I’ve never considered Applebees a part of my neighborhood. I actually don’t consider anything outside of my housing complex a part of my neighborhood. Douglasville’s claim to fame is that it is the place where Atlanta keeps its charm. These slogans scribbled along the bottom of location maps in Arbor Place Mall, it had to be true. But I don’t feel hospitable to Douglasville. It is at once, a large and small town. Everyone knows one another, and if they don’t, they can be related to one another without crossing more than two people. We have all crossed paths at one point or another. But relativity aside, there is always the distance, the avoidance to talk to one another, to relate to one another. There was nothing about Applebees that said neighborhood to me.

But it was the place where things happened. It wasn’t very big, shoved somewhere between a Wendy’s and a Best Buy, it wasn’t hard to find but it wasn’t all that obvious either, until they changed the sign to include a bright red neon apple that catches the sun and reflects it in your eyes when you drive past. Every once in a while you’d read the sign and learn about upcoming trivia or poker nights, big prizes to be one, but for the most part it was just another restaurant for the family to go and eat for a relatively decent price, and quality that was significantly better than the Golden Corral just a few hundred yards away. 

Memory Week 2, Entry 1

Technically started out as a calisthenic but I wanted to keep going with this... except... I'm feeling very uninspired right now. This is literally a push myself writing.

I tell my sister all the time she should shut up. If my sister were a car radio, she'd be the one with the broken mute button, blaring noise that vibrates the subwoofers of some obnoxious Escalade in an elementary school parking lot, and no matter how much you hit the radio, it won't shut up. I was slouching in the computer chair, back straining, studying stripes and spandex on some plus-sized site, when my sister plopped down on the bed next to me. She was talking to my mother on the phone, laughing in her usual volume, cross-legged with waving jaws. I could briefly hear my mom's voice drift from the phone, solely voice, no words, but it was soon lost behind my the cackle of my Ana's laughter.

I do not think that cackling is an exaggeration. If you look up the definition of cackle, it is defined as a shrill cry a hen makes after laying eggs. My sister's laugh ranges anywhere from a "hee-hee" that reminds me of rusty swings to a throaty warble, sometimes coupled with the rare but necessary snort.  This was a "hee-hee-hee" occasion.

"I think you two would really get along," Ana told my mom, her teeth splitting her face, "you guys are just alike."

I'm staring intently at this $120 dollar dress I know I'll never need and really shouldn't bother buying, but I'm also convincing myself of the pros of this dress. If I ever got invited to a party, I'll be prepared. I could wear it to Kroger--at least I could say I wore it once, and show them all I can get done up outside the uniform. Or maybe I can use it as an excuse to actually go out somewhere, though people like me usually make it to the top of the stairs before sighing and crawling back onto the couch, slipping under my blankets, eating Ben and Jerry's. As I am trying to reason out the sweetheart neckline my sister keeps talking to my mother about her friend. More specifically, her best friend's mother, who Ana has taken on like another mother.

"You're both corny." Ana tells her.
My finger slips on the keyboard. 

Junkyard Quotes Week 2, Entries 1-4

"I am jealous of the banana because it's perfectly acceptable for the banana to go naked everyday."

"There's something sadistic about the word, "scream." Like, look in the mirror and say it nice and slow and see if it doesn't make you smile."

"You know how they say "so-and-so" is probably "rolling in their grave?" What about if they died BCE? Do they have any body left to roll or is it basically just dust?"

"He can hear the female voice [in the book of Genesis] throughout the the many, many years." Sturgis on how someone (I forget the name and will have to ask him) believes that a woman wrote the Book of Genesis.

Improv Week 1, Entry 1

Mary Clearman Blew in The Unwanted Child moves between tenses and point of view a lot in her first few paragraphs. Starting out in a present first person narrative, Blew then moves into using a first-person simple future tense, "If he calls me Mommy again, I will break his glasses...I will kick him right in his obscene fat paunch. I will bury my foot in his disgusting flesh" carrying this until she meets her husband. I also find it interesting that on page 44, she changes tactics and begins to use the word "you." It has a way of projecting herself out on the readers. "When you get married, you can move into married student housing." or distancing the subject out further from herself and you, "All young women in 1958 like sex."

I am sitting on the toilet. I am not actually using it, the lid is down, and I am fully clothed. I'm doubled over on the toilet seat, forehead pressed onto my knees, toes pushing against the blue-diamond tile, arms wrapped across my legs. This rushing feeling builds inside my stomach, perhaps less rushing-- more sloshing, like someone has turned a blender on the sushi and fruit punch Gatorade I ate for lunch, and the chucks of salmon and nori are hitting the lining of my stomach, bouncing like pinballs into my esophagus. I swallow hard. 

I will not be concerned that I am fighting vomit on a toilet seat. I will wait here another moment, then place my white flats tossed under the wood-finished cabinets on my feet, slip out the bathroom down the stairs to the front door. I will get in my car and leave, because my sister is waiting for me to pick her up from work. When I leave this place, I will not throw up. Before I leave this place, I will not throw up. I think my stomach swears at me.

I don’t know what it is I see that reminds me of you first. The dusty orange ribbon attached to the carcass of the balloon I got my roommate for her birthday, the tall, yellow-topped container of wipes I left in here so I could wipe the toilet seat before I used it, or the small tube of body shimmer powder—it’s sweet smell dusting and covering the gray holes on top with a white film. It is with these brief glances that I become distracted, forgetting the hummingbirds plastered on the bathroom walls, forgetting the paisley shower curtains—remembering what?

That you’re in Parris Island. Deep breaths, I can feel the rice grains creeping upward, little brown ants with no legs, stalking for an opening. I move, and my elbows press throbbing circles into my thighs. I take two more deep breaths then reach for my shoes.  I hate being late.