purse-snatchers

which is worse?

some scallywag stole my wallet last night right from the same poker table that just a few hours earlier stuffed my wallet with its winnings. a nice man from a town that is about 45 minutes away from amherst tracked my i.d.s and called my dad while i was in the middle of my 3 hour crazy search for it:

dad: hey, how's it going?
me: terribly. i lost my wallet, i'm two hours late for work and i have no money to buy a dinner.
dad: oh, i know where your wallet is.

i'm tearing my hair out looking for my (stunning) turquoise oriental rug wallet, my stomach is starting to growl & eat itself, and my dad tells me with no certain urgency that he has the key to the mystery. that's the gist of it. my whole day took a tailspin and recovered as soon as i saw noah, who wonderfully agreed to drive 45 minutes to lowell, massachusetts so i could relinquish it.

...or...

the house office here at hampshire college is full of shit holiday cheer this time of year and chose to spread the joy of charitable donation with cardboard boxes outside of each of our doors. the boxes are for the food bank, you know 'non-perishable food items, unopened hygiene supplies...' and all that junk. i love giving things away (like my wallet, see above) so i threw in some boxes of kraft macaroni & cheese, certainly not the cheap stuff, and a box of spaghetti. two days ago, i walked by and noticed that the mac & cheeses were gone. hm. maybe they began collecting early. later that night i walked out and saw that the box of spaghetti was still in there. hm. maybe they forgot that one. but then, yesterday i walked by and the spaghetti box was gone too. something's wrong here. can you believe it? somebody has been stealing from my donation box! someone who goes to a $40,000 per year private college and can certainly buy their own goddamn food.

i'm an american. i don't give charitably without expectations. in fact, if i could hand-pick who would get those pasta dishes, i would. i imagined small children with curly hair and dirty faces enjoying the mac & cheese, thinking this is way better than the cheap stuff. certainly not some pretentious hampshire kid with $80 jeans and a hole in their conscious.

i smell too many rats. oh, i also think i have mice in my walls.

which do you think is worse?

i have a branding.

did you know that? i have this so very hologrammic branding on the left side of my belly. if humans were rectangles, it would actually be on a different side of the shape than the side that my rectangular belly would be on. it's on my side.

i have completely forgotten about this branding. until last night when i happened to catch a glimpse in a mirror. oh yeah, i thought, that thing.

one day when i was seventeen years old, i said to my friend lola,hey. i think i'm due for a tattoo. and she said oh yeah? well, what would you get? and i thought and i thought and realized that i don't want any colors on my skin. i don't want any colors on my skin, i told her. what about just a black one?, she said. nope. black is a color. don't ever let some artist tell you otherwise, i said.

so we sit for a while. and then she says,well, what do you want? if it doesn't have any color, even black, what could it be? i told her i wanted a constellation. i don't remember if i had actually decided at that point. probably not. it was just the best thing to say.

oh, great, great!, she says. she leaves. promises to be back in less than two days.

less than two days later, lola comes back. she has a nail in her hand and she asks me if i have a candle. uh-huh, i say, what are we doing? she just asks me where i want the constellation.

now i have scorpius on my side. lola has been gone for a long time. she came back about two years ago to take pictures of my branding. i think it's what she does for a living now.

i was just thinking about it and how it's starting to fade. i don't seem to notice it any more really. i let that crazy put holes in me with a nail made caustic by a candle flame. but it turned out alright.

i think i need a touch-up.