happalieverafter
age 20.
Blue Nail Polish: The Only Necessary Rebellion Against My Mother (Hi, Mom!)
Look(ing) for the Hook
Not Captain Hook. Or the hook of a song. But a regular hook. Like on the back of a bathroom door.
Because I’ve just opened five different stall doors only to be left unfulfilled in my search for a hook. Their remnants are there— the silver plate that was left behind, holes in the shape of an upside down triangle. But no hook itself. Where do these hooks go? What can you pack into your bag that makes it heavy enough to rip a hook down? My bag is often quite heavy when I hang it on a hook, and yet the hook always remains in place post-flush.
These people who rip off hooks and force me to put my stuff down directly on the bathroom floor, they probably have back problems too.
John Baldessari
Pure Beauty
1966 to 1968
Greetings
I think something that would be really troubling for aliens is nail polish. Because if they saw pictures of people with colored nails, they would probably think that we were born that way. Why else would fingertips be colored? Earthlings actually manufacture a certain kind of paint that is designated for 20 special slots on the body? Laughable. Besides, it helps to classify them. Rockers and goths are born with the black. Sophisticates have the French tips. Pretties in pink.
My nail polish is almost always chipped off and the color is constantly changing. The aliens would observe me and conclude: identity crisis!
Things That Made Today Good
1. Reading Mary Shelley
2. Pickles
3. When upon desiring to take advantage of the weather wardrobe-wise with skirt, finding legs adequately shaved
Slope
It is best to be sitting at the top of a hill when embarrassed in a public setting. Today, when something embarrassing happened to me, I was lucky to find myself atop of a hill… not at the bottom. No faces were looking at me. Just turned backs. Because when people sit down on a hill, they like to place their feet lower than their torsos. At first thought this seems like a reasonless trend. Then again it just wouldn’t be logical to sit on a hill with your feet up high and your back to the bottom. I guess it would give you the sensation of falling backwards, out of control. Or perhaps walking has so thoroughly conditioned us to believe that feet should be below the knees, we cannot see it any other way.
Except maybe for sleeping. But even then a pillow creates a bodily hierarchy.
Dynamics: Thick Fabrics, Furry Hoods, and Heavy Books
Here’s the thing about coats and bags: the bulkier the coat, the harder it is for the straps of the bag to stay on your shoulder. Thus the bag falls onto your elbow. This winter phenomenon is especially brutal when a) the bag is very heavy, b) you are feeling claustrophobic in your excess of clothing as it is, and/or c) you are holding hot coffee/something breakable in the hand of the arm the bag surprise drops down upon. I wonder if my shoulders are just too narrow. I wonder what I would look like with broader shoulders. And if I had been born in a colder place, would my shoulders be genetically engineered to be broader… like a survival of the fittest kind of thing? I’ve never really noticed the shoulder qualities of my friends, of-cold-weather-origins or otherwise. Then again, I never was motivated to look.
what happens when you reach the edge of the earth
Spanish Lesson
“Why was Amor presented as naked? Well, for certain things, you shouldn’t dress.”
like Machado
i am the pez not the pescado
English Class: A Close-Up
There are two girls in my English class who are not like the rest. One is brunette, small, and switches between two pairs of stylish shoes— depending on the weather. The other is blonde with hair that does exactly what she tells it. They sit together and sip coffee through a straw and bite their nails. Then they add to the discussion. Then they bite their nails again, look at the damage (or they imperfection which must be attacked by tooth), and bite some more.
At this point, I don’t think there is anything left to bite. Just an instinct or a nervous habit, similar to my repetetive doodles (mostly eyeballs).
