Straight No Chaser

Rites of Passage

tomorrow morning i have to wake up at eight, approach the dean of undergraduate affairs and convince her to let me take her nineteenth-century literature class this semester. and come up with an airtight reason why i'm on the roster, and thus technically registered, but did not show up for a single class for either of the first two weeks. i had her before, freshman year, for honors first-year composition. she really liked me then. she called me a "stylistic wonder" and xeroxed pieces of my papers to pass out to the class. that was quite an ego boost, but that's been two years ago now. i doubt my teacher's pet status will carry over, especially since it will seem to her as though i blew off four meetings of an upperclassmen seminar.

i hate seeming like a slacker. sorry i slacked off for the first two weeks. cut me some slack, though, would you, and let me slack my way into your class? i promise not to slack off anymore. i was just slack with my scheduling, this time around.

small schools suck. if her class were held in a giant lecture hall, she'd never have to know that i wasn't there for the first two weeks, or that i was there for the last sixteen. i'd just float in among the other seventy-five students on days when i felt like coming, sit in the back and write smut for an hour and a half. nineteenth century literature? not interested. i wanted the toni morrison seminar, but unfortunately so does everybody else.

marcus misses me. we miss each other. this is not the first time that's happened, but it is by far the stupidest, because he's right there and i'm right here, and i've already said i would walk/drive to him if that made it easier. we have agreed to postpone togetherness till he is well, having decided that improvements in his health (no more cold, no more dark eye circles, gain back those six or seven pounds lost during grind week) will mean that he's rested and centered and ready to party. on a selfish plane, i'd love to take him sick, sucking him dry of whatever life is left. totally unafraid of his germs, because he's been sick before, and i've ingested more than a few of them, i'm sure, and have come out unscathed every time.

sometimes my inner twenty-year-old and my innerer fifty-five-year-old have to go to war. twenty-year-old says be selfish! kicks fifty-five in the knees, often gets her way because she's younger and louder and brattier. fifty-five, who is thoughtful and wise beyond her years, speaks slowly and says "think of someone other than yourself, let the boy get well and then steal his babies." gawd i hate her. like, she totally fucks everything up. she's the one who came up with this whole me-time idea for marcus, reasoning that not only would it be good for him, in the long run it'd do wonders for us too. the us that only thrives when we're each thriving individually. twenty-year-old now has fifty-five in a chokehold over that. an angry half nelson that threatens to double itself if she comes up with one more stupid, poorly thought-out, sexually-frustrate-me-till-i-start-eating-plants bad idea.

it would do me a world of good if they'd both shut up. when they work together, as a team, i come out around thirty-two, and that works just fine. a good age, that.