Sunday, July 4, 2010

Status

Cruising the town on your bicycle, riding up high on one pedal down the sidewalk. You're acting cool, calm, collected, untouchable. You're wearing that cool sweater you found at the free store, the perfectly worn in kicks, and feeling really hip. Even when things don't go your way, when you discover that no store seems to have what you are looking for, and you relent and resort to plan B, you take solace in the fact that the guy in the computer section was taken aback by your knowledge of cables. You stop for coffee, collect your nerves. You make conversation with near strangers. Stare at birds on the powerlines. Pet dogs wearing shirts. Make witty comments about the dogs in shirts. The wind in your hair on the ride home makes you feel free.

Really you're awkward, and didn't have half a notion what to say. You tactfully hide the fact that you are shaking out of nervousness. Somehow your brain spit out combinations of words that seemed to fit together. You analyze the day from afar, sitting in your front yard with an amplifier, listening to music in the sun. You get excited over pranks that aim to convince your housemates that robots are taking over the world. You feel strange, somewhat alien, and often very alone. You amuse yourself drawing strange pictures of strange events happening to strange creatures. Somehow you have cobbled this strange mixture of social awkwardness and dreaming into a personality. This is who you are, and you are fine with it-- though you wouldn't mind a bit more people skills. You feel cool, sometimes.

Then there's that moment, as you prepare for a morning shower, when you are wearing only Halloween socks, and you feel so ineffably cool. But only because the door is locked.

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