Straight No Chaser

I Can't Sleep

two-hour conversation ended well, very well. the bat mob can relax for another day.

he thinks it would be "criminal" for a woman to abort his baby without consulting him first. or so he says, but i have a hard time believing it--he is rigidly pro-life (weird enough for a liberal black college student) but also extremely upwardly mobile, and i can't imagine he'd compromise either for the sake of the other. i've had this daydream a million times, i get pregnant somehow (freakishly overzealous sperm, i guess; it's the only way since he's a committed virgin too) and i don't want to ruin his life or burden him at all, but i tell him for propriety's sake...and he says something cryptic that basically means he's going to turn a blind eye and hope i "take care of it."

why were we even talking about that? jessica. something about jessica. jessica jessica jessica, forty-five minutes of talking about jessica. we've finally gotten to a place where that doesn't ruin everything, thank GOD, and where it's completely acceptable to segue seamlessly between me and her, us and them, my completely hypothetical pregnancies and her real-life ultrafailures.

sometimes i wonder whether he does that on purpose, steers our conversation out of the mundane and into my psyche, because he knows it makes me shiver when we go there. he thinks adopting would be insanely difficult because "it'd be hard to connect with anything that hadn't existed within you," and then i reminded him that he (and grim and chad and donald fauntleroy duck and every male who plans on having kids someday) will have to cope with that particular difficulty, blah blah blah [insert sperm joke], and eventually the talk fell right back into my comfort zone. he could probably write a story that'd fit right in with the conspicuously themed set in my fiction folder. he's tried, in fact; i probably asked him to once or twice and he always ended up chattering about leaves and nature, and quoting that poem that starts with "green is nature's gold."

meanwhile lana sat cutely by my hand, entertaining fond marcusy thoughts of her own, i'm sure.

actually, it turns out that stupid stupid godawful green dress story wound up in the short story newsletter. not stupid stupid. i actually still pretty much like it, and i know it's got some fans out there in the crowd. stupid, though, because it's risky, because people who read that first (before they know what an insecure and obsessively descriptive psychopath i am) miss the point completely, and tell me so in their reviews. perfectly fine, of course, they're entitled to their opinions and i'm receptive to feedback, but one thing i've never been able to work out is, how does one reconcile the critical fours with the praise-laden fives? there must be some happy (and clearly explained) medium, which is why at least ninety percent of my reviews come with half-stars tacked on. i wish.

i'm just now remembering that my parents bought this baby grand primarily for my benefit, in the hopes that i'd someday be self-motivated to practice, and would grow up to be a nationally acclaimed concert pianist or something. in my spare time, when i wasn't filling their nine hundred vicarious career aspirations. i never liked practicing, but i love music, and i took thirteen years of lessons. given those things, i'd have had to try really hard to suck, even after the lessons were over. i'm looking at the piano's reflection in the mirror and absolutely aching to play something. i almost never feel that way in the daytime, when there's no danger of waking anybody up. of course, that's probably because in the daytime, when i want to play, i play.

i'm still not sleepy. grimaaron, the virgin suicides is painful. remember what i said about us reading all his books, one by one, on car trips back and forth between ohio and maryland? er, scratch that, unless it magically turns around in the second half. unless you've read it and loved it, in which case i'll probably have to start over and figure out where i went wrong.

now i'm sleepy. i'm really sorry if you suffered through this. please don't stop being my friend, okay? je t'aime.