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Art Colony: my last column wasn't good so here's a new one
Tuesday, April 26, 2005
› by victoria
I must've done something shitty with my last post or else people are just not liking what I write so I'm going to try to write something better. Make reparations, so to speak. Ameliorate the situation. And all that.
Acetinamophen and Nicotine hate each other. Or so I'm surmising from the chaos in my brain due to taking 1,500 or so milligrams of Acetinamophen (and his amigo, Caffeine) pills plus smoking 3 cigarettes so far today. So dizzy...
I am reading "Le Nouvel Observateur" from March 9, 2005. Or trying to. I feel like my french is a slippery eel that is sliding out between my fingers. I want to remember it, I want oh so badly to speak it, but there's a fog that's come between me and the french language. I suspect it was there, even back in the old days quand j'etudie le francais, but I couldn't conjugate verbs that well back then, even though--like David Sedaris--I had a damn good grasp on nouns. And I placed 5th in the state on the highschool french exam.
when I was little, I was absolutely terrified of going on the Milwaukee Public Transit System, AKA MPTS, AKA "The Bus." Perhaps it was being smaller than everyone else leading to a distorted view of the world, perhaps it was the fact that I grew up in the largely upper-middle-class neighborhood of Shorewood where the only loud things are the leafblowers and lawnmowers. Everyone else was huge, and occasionally there were one or two people who smelled terrific (in the terror-inspiring way) and then there were loud people who would talk to themselves like my cousin Carla does sometimes but way louder. My parents would take me on the bus to go to the Dental School at the university where I currently attend because when I was little and even older I would have my dental cleanings and orthodontics done here. As I got older--as in, highschool age--I would deliberately ask my mom every saturday for one bus ticket. I would ride the #30 from Shorewood to Downtown Milwaukee, about a 5 mile distance, to the Central Library. My Dad would never take me to the downtown library, not ever. I think maybe he took me to it 3 times during the whole 19 years I lived with them. So I would go into the Central Library by myself and check out 10 or so books on every topic I was interested in, from Victorian Crime to Communist Art to Cryptozoology to Young Adult Novels (and oh! how I love Young Adult novels!), and then I would pack those books into my backpack and walk the 5 miles home through downtown and then the East Side and then through the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Campus and then to my house, usually picking up a soda and some bubble-gum-candy along the way home. And then I would sit--in the front porch if it was cold, in the backyard chaise lounge if it was warm outside--and read through those ten books in one afternoon, downing the words with a chaser of ice-cold soda.
That's what I call relaxing.
[And thank you, Katie, for the leg up on bus fare so Biff and I can take the bus home instead of walking in the chilly weather at 9 PM.]
Finally, in my cathartic observations for today, the tuesday of marathon length that goes from early in the morning until late at night, here's a random short answer essay question:
If you have a significant other/person you are in a relationship with, and other people hit on them, how do you feel about this? And why?
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