I've been coming to the coffee shop every Friday after volunteering in Ellie's classroom for a couple months now. I thought if I gave myself a treat: a coffee, a cookie, that I'd stop dreading the hours I spend closed up in a classroom with 7 and 8 year olds. Lord help me, hours I freely volunteered, without any coercion from the school, the teacher, Ellie's baby blue eyes, or the moral judgement of general society. Nope. This. This is something I brought on myself. And every Friday, I. Am. Spent. Spent from working with a classroom full of (and do read this in your best Snow White voice) delightful children with eyes full of promise and innocence. But, the bribery? It's not working. And I sit here, trying to sigh the bleariness out of my brain.
I end up spending that hour and a half before I have to race off and pick up the girls from school, eating my cookie, drinking my coffee, and staring at my computer screen. I start sentences, I abandon them. I stalk poets from the early 19th century on the internet. (Yeah. I know where you live now, Benjamin F. Brown.) I sigh. Repeatedly. I read computer screens over the shoulders of other coffee patrons. (Just kidding. That's creepy. Totally don't do that.) I listen to the baristas talk about their plans for the weekend. (Wild Child playing at the Crocodile tonight. Be there or be square.) But, being productive, is not a thing. (And yes, I'm changing the definition of productive from "having the quality of power of producing especially in abundance" to "writing a quality post about Bavarian Folk Dancing and Ventriloquist Wine Tasting Schools"-ah, the heady days of 2012...)
But, today, I'm turning over a new leaf. Well, not a new new leaf. It's more of an old leaf. A leaf circa 1996. Which, is really more of a vintage leaf than an old one, if we want to banter semantics (and write confusing sentences). Although, in my dresser are still some clothes from 1996, so, maybe it's not a vintage leaf, but, more of a grossly out of style leaf-like mom jeans. Oh! Or fanny packs. Remember fanny packs? Hahaha! What were we thinking? (Dudes. I just did a quick google check on fanny packs. Did you know!?! They're, like, a thing again! And they come in faux fur. Like bunny tails.) But sometimes, like XL purple sweat pants from 1996, grossly out of style leaves are exactly what we need.
Back in 1996 I was in college, carrying 20 credits. And, you know what I got really good at? Putting on my headphones, cranking the Michael W. Smith (don't judge), twisting my hair up with a pencil, and typing. Didn't matter what exactly-a paper for my Music in America class, a lab report for Environmental Science, mapping prehistoric sites for Archaeology in the Southwest, a lesson plan for Principles of Mathematics, a case study (with as many educational buzz words as I could fit and still have it make sense) for Educational Psychology.... Anything that needed to be written, created, listed, formed, could be completed in no more than an hour and a half. As long as I was facing a wall, wearing comfy sweats, hair twisted into a bun and had a pile of off-brand Cheerios beside me, all would be completed. All would be written. All could be faked. No matter how drained I felt.
So, here I sit, at the coffee shop. Hair held back by a yellow pencil, Wild Child blasting on my headphones (thank you for making me hip and happening, baristas), staring at a blank wall. No distractions. No daydreaming about pursuing my own personal vigilante vendetta vengeance against Benjamin F. Brown, a' la Antonio Banderas style. Just me, and the keyboard. Typing. Like it's 1996 and I have to take a music dictation test over in the music building in 25 minutes.
*Or rather Clive lent me a book, that Wil Wheaton wrote in 2004, that told me to be more real on the internet. So I told everyone that I hate babies. (Still totally true.)
Update:
Thanks to the magic of the internet (whose superpower is to know all the things) I now know that:
1) Christopher Walken starred in the movie Vendetta,
2) I've never seen Vendetta, and
3) in my head? I was mixing Vendetta up with The Mask of Zorro.
No worries. I mean, I'll need to find a cape, a mask and a sombrero cordobes, but I'm pretty sure I can still make this poet vendetta thing work. *glare* Benjamin.
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