Not Even Raisinets

Cigarette smoke is still woven into my sweatshirt. I know I should wash it, but I’d hate for it to lose its black and that soft new sweatshirt feel. Work is slow right now, too slow. A man on the bus the other day slurred, “this bus is as slow as a turtle,” on his cell phone. I thought it was an all too obvious simile. However, here I am today, thinking that work is as slow as a turtle. I have time to think about my sweatshirt. I have time to contemplate getting a sweatshirt, of all things, dry-cleaned.

I have time to read about E! on the verge of canceling Taradise. Then my mind, with all this time, spins… oh how “Tara-ble” that’d be.

And this is my life… a colorless cubicle with file cabinets covered in magnets of trips people have taken and photos of smiles that need to be captured… and I’m lucky. I’m lucky to have fluorescent lights over my head and an empty dish stained red from strawberries. And I’m cursed with this incessant desire to always want more. I’m cursed that more can’t even satiate me.

I think about my psychiatrist dad always telling me to enjoy the taste of a raisin, but they’re much too small for me. They just don’t last long enough. And I can sit here and think about children in Africa with poochy stomachs and flies buzzing around their heads, and still that raisin doesn’t taste so good.

With work slow like a bus in Ukraine driving uphill, all I do is think. Will I get laid off? What will I do if I get laid off? Try something new? Peace Corps, reality TV, UCLA Education Abroad, and now home finance in 6 years just isn’t enough “trying something new”? and then what? And then what? And then?
My mouth is slightly parted like Napoleon Dynamite and my stare blank. Someone could throw a rubber ball at my face and my expression wouldn’t change. I wouldn’t mind my mind matching my mouth and stare.