starched collar girls

matthew on smith's point july 2009, mass.




summer was beautiful but school is just feeling so good. there's nothing quite like a goal, or that lovely illusion of working towards a glowing noble purpose for us goal-oriented animals. when it's not about finding and killing your food, when it's not about a safe place to sleep or staying warm anymore, it has to be about something else. we'd all go crazy and destroy ourselves from a lack of a goal if it wasn't for Learning. or i would.

getting up early and having just enough time for an apple feels good. empty pretty friendly-city-looking streets in the morning feel good. yawning in class feels good.

i'm an okay waitress but a better student. i love the restaurant but it challenges me in ways i know i can't answer, like high school phys-ed, like working at that donut shop, things i feel like i should be able to excel at since i can do these other supposedly important things, like school and books. but waitressing and schooling inhabit two different worlds of ability and i'll always be the fumbling waitress who cannot ever remember where the peach mint sangria is or how to void a credit card.

so i suppose i was born a little malevolved, little baby brain thinking oh well okay i'm fed and happy and warm and not in the rain or in the stomachs of terrestrial superfauna so maybe i can just disregard all of those necessary things, things like attention, memory, sight, acting without thinking, running, a grasp of numbers and distances and time and an ability to devalue lacy silly things like emotion and big Cosmic Crisis in order to function as a cog, a useful gear, because things still need working to produce the fantastic world i was born into and i haven't quite yet earned my vittles to the extent where i could just sit and learn and worry and love and have the world trust that this was how i fit and work into the gears of the machine of the earth running from approximately 1989 until 2079 A.D.

No,
I need to learn some real earth skills. and i can cook and clean and sew with the best of them, i can grow food on the little pots of dirt i own since i don't have any claim to dirt on the ground. i have some post-apocalypse end time skills.

but i could never be the best waitress, i'll always be silly and ridiculous to the good ones i'm sure. any register job i've ever held has concluded with my boss thinking that i'm an idiot, and they ask the grades i earn concernedly.

so i'm glad i spent the summer as a waitress feeling incompetent but the sort of incompetent you know is internal and unchangeable,
but damn it feels so good to be back in little rooms with big books silenced by the total concentration and love for what you are thinking about and knowing that this, maybe, is the part of you and life and skill that you are able to become better at.

it feels a little too cozy but i'm okay with that for now.
there are things i'd rather be
and i could never deny my admiration for the incredible people i worked with, so high functioning, how does a person even become that perfectly sensible, perfectly working. i want to be that serious, i wish i wasn't embarrassed by my silliness, my impractical and unnecessary skills and loves. i wish i didn't feel the guilt that makes me call them impractical and unnecessary and silly, and i wish i knew if that guilt came from me or from the world i've grown up in and known.

someday maybe i'll smash all i've learned and all i've thought and amassed and combed through into a large level brick and something can actually sit on it, be elevated by it, because if i don't do something concrete before i die it'll just kill me.

I'M IN MY NEW DECADE NOW. let's get going elise.