What I do remember are Mario coin leaves on some of the deciduous trees.  These leaves had a light-reflective side and they were flickering when I learned the Rule of 9.  

Where was I during the first 22 years of my life?  I vaguely remember being sent to fine arts camp when I was 14. 

So I am practicing this new austerity, which is : not thinking about my problems when other people are around. 

Every time someone gets on the elevator or parks their car by mine, I silence the hyperactive internal narrator that shares a brain with me:

Out of respect for your presence I shut off the random clanging in my head.  

Don’t misunderstand me.  It’s not that I’m putting a ban on talking about problems here.  It’s just that, instead of being the girl who is always asking what-do-you-think-he-or-she-meant-when-they-said blah blah blah, I want to be the one who answers

yeah, I worry about that too sometimes. 

Never never never never never, said the elevator as it went down to floor 1.  It was 7:02 pm and I still had 800 words to write. 

Waddling across campus carrying the package through backpacks and armies of sprinklers, smearing some sharpie ink onto my palms and somehow getting it on my face before the end of the walk. 

It was my second trip.  On the first one I had to get a little assertive with the student assistant over a packaging issue while uncompressed tarball winced and cowered. (God how I hate that).  Now I was standing on the median while parts  of the First Surrealist Manifesto trailed through my head, going "lusterless fate, lusterless fate" under the whir of speeding cars. 

These are normal components of a Hilary summer.  I looked out into the crowd, worrying briefly, and wondered if I would ever beat my own matchless record at avoiding name deleted while walking through the DIA while he was working.  Or was that my peak moment of evasive action? 

Now, I thought, breaking off a piece of my PBJ.

So I fed some crust to a seagull while hovering over her like a big, smiling predator.  Then we glided on, me and the seagull,  and I used some rhetoric on myself while the sharpie dried out in the sun. 

Do you know how I knew which one of 30,000 girls with the same name on Facebook was *my* friend from High School?  Because when I clicked on her name, it translated everything on my computer into Japanese. 

If my sons hit the road to perform a ballad about the husband who had ditched me to focus more on his job, I would disown them. 

I tried to pick up a container of veggies at B&N and it burst into a giant cloud of broccoli.  So I edged away from the exploding container and moved forward with the line while 3 colleagues from the English Department picked broccoli florets off of themselves. 

Do you know who’s on my nerves today?  White people. 

It’s like, OK: The corner of our block is a local crack spot.  We have neighbors living in hazardous, underground converted apartments due to the fear of deportation.  I know one woman with mental health problems whose kids have probably never seen the inside of a school.   

And you’re going to strengthen our block by building a community garden?  Do you ever notice that the "community" you’re trying to strengthen consists exclusively of other white people from Southwest Detroit’s petit burgeois? 

I don’t know.  It’s just too puppies and unicorns for me. 

I’m going to think of this as a blog for Molly and Sarah, the only people who read it. So I say unto you, Molly and Sarah, don’t waste your money on the new Ben Harper CD.