I am really glad that I do not watch the news. Or, in the past few years, t.v. in general.
I am really glad that my boyfriend loves the fact that I would much prefer reading in bed next to him than going out anywhere.
I am less happy about confined friendships.
I am severely disappointed in how much I worry.

Ta-da.

Sometimes I feel infinitely happier without a man.

Mostly because I think I am my best self when I am not worrying about someone else's happiness.

Things I need to get done:
-lawrence paper
-finishing movie response
-ana maria paragraph
(both of which are about 3 weeks overdue)
-arrangement
-spanish interpreting excercises
-reading trabing, mikkelson, websites, and not knowing for what purpose these things are being assigned
-philosophy reading
-spanish am lit reading
-interpreting introduction paragraph in Spanish and English

I am losing my English.
I am losing sleep.
I am losing the part of my sanity I usually have.
I am infinitely bored with schoolwork.


Aaaaaaaaaaaand nap.

The slow and painful death of a coffee shop.

Fran's husband died fifteen years ago. He painted a lot of pictures of cows.
One day, Fran came in to Hava Java and hung those pictures. She was very meticulous about how and where the pictures should be hung. It started with two cows and a few smartly-placed paintbrushes. Then the cows became herded on the walls, eating grass, blue cows, purple cows, cows and disproportionately-sized roosters. And then she put up a biography on her dead husband, and an old picture. I think she must have taken it in the seventies. I think she wants to sell some of the paintings. I bet she is lonely, living wherever she lives, with a bunch of paintings of cows.

Fran is very clearly crazy and on a lot of illegal substances. She talks a lot about salvation and about Vietnam, especially if you are talking about things that are in no way related to salvation and Vietnam. But there is some light, or thread, that connects her ramblings to reality; if you reminded her, she could perhaps be re-calibrated to return to the locus that the conversation had spurred from.

I saw Fran outside of the coffee shop the last day I walked down there. The fair was going on, and it smelled like petting zoo five miles in any direction from the grounds. She was sitting outside and staring at a back copy of the New York Times. I asked her why Hava Java was closed, because usually Hava Java is only closed on Christmas. She told me it was Jesus and Vietnam, and adamantly swung her paper very close to my head. So I looked at a sign on the door. Hava Java was undergoing renovations. It would be open at nine a.m., although it did not specify what day at nine a.m. it would re-open.

I drove by for a few days. It was not open at nine a.m. or at any other time. New signs appeared on top of the old sign. Signs from the health department. Signs detailing stop-work orders, because the owners had not obtained a permit for construction. And a sign on top of all signs, thanking the loyal customers of Hava Java for voting it the best coffee shop in the Lehigh Valley area. Lots of signs, but no nine a.m. openings.

Hava Java has a following of people. Some are hipsters. Some are strung-out hippies. Mostly it is a group of 20-somethings who desperately look for intellectual solace in an abandoned steel town. They all lament that Hava Java has been closed for so long. They prophesy its impending doom. The owners have no money to pay the baristas, let alone reconstruct a coffee shop and pay off city fines. The health department has declared it not up to code. They all call for something to be done, for someone to lend money. None of them have any money except for the fifty cents they spend on playing pool at a local bar. And so they lament.

Fran has been wandering. I am not sure if her dead husband's pictures are still in the shop or not. But she seems to be keeping guard of something.

Joe

Joe smokes.

Joe smokes a lot.

He won't do it in his apartment, although when he can't find his lighter, he'll turn on the gas to the stove and tilt his lips-holding-cigarette gently into the flame.

Gently and he walks down the stairs, ferociously sucking in and puffing out, jerkily inserting and uninserting. Something coital about the way he puffs, jerks, exhales, tilts his head into the flame. His legs are long and so watching him from below, one can see how his knees have to bend slightly too much, slightly too extravagantly, grotesquely, and something French about it.

And so he sits on the stoop outside his house, and watches the college kids as they neatly file down the street to the bar on the corner, and unneatly wobble back up the street toward home two hours later. And he smokes.

Sometimes he'll put his arm around me, although I don't think it is a conscious effort. It is usually removed quickly, like he just wanted to make sure I was there for a second. Once that is found out, he continues smoking, tongue curled around cattail whisps of ghostlike ectoplasm, guiding it into circular patterns of soot in sky. Soot in lungs remains unseen.

And you can taste the tobacco in his kisses. His gentle kisses, playful kisses, his nose nuzzled gently into your cheek. He has soft lips and he smells good. There is much to be said about a man with soft lips, who smells good, who tastes of tobacco and tilts his head into an open flame.